Dame Antonia Byatt dead: Award-winning Possession author AS Byatt dies aged 87

Dame Antonia Byatt has died at the age of 87, her publisher has said. The renowned Sheffield-born author, known as AS Byatt, won the 1990 Booker Prize for romance novel Possession. Her death was confirmed by her publisher on Friday, November 17.

Clara Farmer, her publisher at Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Penguin Random House, said: “Antonia’s books are the most wonderful jewel boxes of stories and ideas. Her compulsion to write (A4 blue notebook always to hand) and her ability to create intricate skeins of narrative was remarkable. It was always a treat to see her, to hear updates about her evolving literary characters and indulge in delicious titbits of literary gossip.

“Like all Chatto’s publishers before me, I was devoted to her and her writing. (The year) 2024 would have been her 60th (Diamond) anniversary as a Chatto author. We mourn her loss but it’s a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come.”

Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance won the Booker Prize in 1990, and her short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) won the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 1995. Meanwhile, her novel The Children's Book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2009 and received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2010.

Other titles including Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976) are two of her critical examinations of Dame Iris Murdoch (a friend and mentor). Meanwhile, Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) and Portraits in Fiction (2001) are two of her major analytical studies.