A.S. Byatt’s 1990 Booker Prize-winner is a gloriously exhilarating novel of both wit and romance. Read an extract from January’s Monthly Spotlight here
A.S. Byatt
- Lived
- -
- Prizes judged
A.S. Byatt won the Booker Prize in 1990 with Possession and was shortlisted in 2009 with The Children’s Book. Writing, she said, ‘is simply the most important thing in my life’
Antonia Byatt published her first novel in 1964 and, apart from an interlude as an academic, wrote them – and short stories, essays and critical appreciations – for the next six decades. Although she was known for her high intellectualism, on winning the Booker Prize in 1990, she famously declared – with perhaps a hint of a josh – that she would spend the winnings on a swimming pool for her house in France.
Byatt said that writing is about ‘pleasure’ but it is a pleasure she took very seriously: ‘I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing,’ she wrote. She died in November 2023.
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Possession
Winner of The Booker Prize 1990
- By
- A.S. Byatt
- Published by
- Chatto & Windus
The winner of the 1990 Booker Prize. Two modern-day academics uncover a secret affair between famous fictional poets in A.S. Byatt’s gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance
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A.S. Byatt’s vivid and deeply affecting historical fiction is the story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day
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Reading guide: Possession by A.S. Byatt
- Book extract