A. S. Byatt (Dame Antonia Susan Duffy) is a Booker Prize–winning English novelist and poet.
Born in Sheffield, England, Byatt was educated at boarding schools before going to Cambridge to complete a Bachelor of Arts degree. She followed this with further degrees at Bryn Mawr College and Oxford. Byatt published her first novel, Shadow of a Sun, in 1964. This marked the start of a prolific writing career, with output that included fiction, short story collections, biographies, essays, and the editing of scholarly collections. Byatt taught in the Extra-Mural Department of London University and the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1972 became a full-time lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London. She was active as a lecturer until 1983, when she chose to focus on writing full time.
Byatt won her first major literary award in 1986, when her novel Still Life was awarded the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. Since then, she has won the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She has also been awarded several honorary doctorates and was named a Dame of the British Empire.