The British writer A.S. Byatt, awarded the Booker Prize in 1990 for her novel Possession, has died at the age of 87, her publishing house announced on Friday, November 17.
“His way of writing compulsively (A4 notebook always at hand) and his ability to create complex skeins were remarkable,” praised his editor Clara Farmer, at Chatto
Born on August 24, 1936 in Sheffield, Yorkshire (northern England), Antonia Susan Byatt was educated at Cambridge, at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, then at Oxford. She then taught English and American literature at University College London, before devoting herself entirely to literature from 1983.
Her first novel Shadow of a Sun, published in 1964 (L’Ombre du soleil, Flammarion, 2009), tells the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominating father. The Game, in 1967, examines the relationship between two sisters. Her father, John Drabble, and her sister, Margaret Drabble, with whom she had a difficult relationship, were both also novelists. Married twice, mother of three daughters, her personal life was marked by the tragedy of the death of her son in a car accident.
Several novels adapted for cinema
A.S. Byatt began a series of four novels about a Yorkshire family with The Virgin in the Garden in 1978: Still Life in 1985, Babel Tower in 1996 (La Tour de Babel, Flammarion, 2001) and A Whistling Woman in 2002 (Une femme qui sisle, Flammarion, 2003).
His best-known book, Possession, won the Booker Prize, which recognizes the best English-speaking authors from the Commonwealth and Ireland. It was adapted into a film in 2002 by Neil LaBute, starring actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Another of his novels, Of Angels and Insects (Flammarion, 1995), was adapted for the screen by Philip Haas in 1995, starring Patsy Kensit, Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas.
In her novels, she is a chameleon who multiplies voices, adopts different points of view and styles depending on her characters. “I like novels with a large number of people and perceptions, not ones that take a single narrow point of view, that of the author or of a character,” she explained. Eminently intellectual, she sparked controversy when she bluntly criticized J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga, “written for people whose imagination is confined to television cartoons and the world of soaps, to television- reality and celebrity gossip.”
