Byatt, Dame A(ntonia) S(usan), n�e Drabble 1936-
English novelist and critic

She was born in Sheffield and educated at the Mount School, York, and at Newnham College, Cambridge. After some years as a teacher and academic, she published Degrees of Freedom (1965), the first full-length study of Iris Murdoch's novels, whose philosophical style has influenced her own. Further highly respected critical works followed. She made her reputation as a novelist with her third novel, The Virgin in the Garden (1978). This was followed by Still Life (1985), Possession (1990), which won the Booker Prize, and Babel Tower (1996). She has also written on Ford Madox Ford and on 18th- and 19th-century poetry. Her interests extend to art and art history, literary and social history, and philosophy, all of which feature in her novels. She published a volume of short stories, The Matisse Stories, in 1994 and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, a collection of fairy tales, in 1995. She is the elder sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble.