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A. S. Byatt, "The Thing in the Forest"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(b. 1936)

The oldest of four children (and half-sister of novelist Margaret Drabble), Antonia Susan Byatt was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, and worked toward her doctorate in seventeenth-century English literature at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and at Somerville College, Oxford.In 1964 Byatt began teaching at the University of London, the same year she published her first work, Shadow of a Sun, a novel about a young woman attempting to escape the influence of her novelist father. Byatt has drawn on her rich academic background in novels such as The Game (1967), The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), the Booker Prize–winning Possession (1989), Babel Tower (1996), The Biographer's Tale (2001), and A Whistling Woman (2002), and such story collections as Sugar (1989) and Little Black Book of Stories (2004). She has also published many works of literary criticism, including Degrees of Freedom (1965) and Their Time (1970), a study of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Byatt lives in London.

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