A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt was a British novelist, poet, and literary critic who wrote in the English language, born in Sheffield on 24 August 1936 and died on 16 November 2023.
Byatt's formal education took her across several institutions, beginning at Sheffield High School for Girls and The Mount School in York, before she went on to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Alongside her writing career, she worked as a university teacher. Her fiction attracted significant recognition over the course of her career: she received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, as well as the O. Henry Award. Her contributions to literature were also acknowledged through broader honours, including the Erasmus Prize and an honorary doctorate from Leiden University. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was later elevated to Dame Commander of the same order. Her standing within British literary culture was further marked by her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Byatt worked across fiction, poetry, and criticism, and her output reflected a sustained engagement with multiple literary forms throughout her life. The recognition she received from the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature points to one strand of her fictional work, while the combination of the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the O. Henry Award indicates a range that extended across the novel and shorter prose forms. As a literary critic in addition to a creative writer, her career encompassed both the production and the analysis of literature in the English language.
Quotes by A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt's insights on:
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic.
Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone’s primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.
How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.
Pedro of Portugal’s rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed beside him on his travels, leather-brown and skeletal, crowned with lace and gold circlet, hung about with chains of diamonds and pearls, her bone-fingers fantastically ringed.
Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.
Therefore,′ said Loki the mockery, to the snake his daughter, ’we need to know everything, or at least as much as we can. The gods have secret runes to help in the hunt, or give victory in battle. They hammer, they slash. They do not study. I study. I know.