A.S. Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble; she writes under a name consisting of her initials and the surname of her first husband. Byatt was born on August 24 1936 in Sheffield, England. She was born into a well-educated family: her father and brother were both lawyers, while her mother was a literary scholar with a focus on the Victorian poet Robert Browning. Byatt's sisters would go on to become an author and an art historian. Byatt was educated at boarding schools before going to Cambridge to complete her Bachelor of Arts degree. She followed this with further degrees at Bryn Mawr College and Oxford.
Byatt published her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, in 1964. This marked the...
