A.S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy HonFBA (née Drabble; born 24 August 1936), known professionally as A. S. Byatt ( BY-ət), is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. 2Biography Byatt was born in Sheffield as Antonia Susan Drabble, the eldest child of John Drabble, QC, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard Drabble QC is a barrister. As a result of the bombing of Sheffield during the Second World War the family moved to York. Byatt's upbringing was fairly unhappy as she struggled against her domineering mother. She was educated at two independent boarding schools, Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School in York. She noted in an interview in 2009, "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful – you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things." She did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends. She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxfor