Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan) (1936– )

English novelist and critic. Her fifth novel, Possession (1990, filmed 2002) won the Booker Prize. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is a confident, zestfully handled account of a varied group of characters putting on a school play during the coronation year of 1953. Part of a sequence, it was followed by Still Life (1985), and Babel Tower (1996).

Byatt was born in Sheffield and educated at a Quaker boarding school (with her sister, novelist Margaret Drabble) and at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her critical works include Degrees of Freedom (1965), the first major study of Iris Murdoch. She was a lecturer at University College, London, England, 1972–83.

Her collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories (1987), The Matisse Stories (1993), and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998). Other works include the novels The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), Angels and Insects (1992, filmed 1996), and A Biographer's Tale (2000).