British · 1936–2023
A.S. Byatt constructed literary labyrinths. "Possession" won the 1990 Booker Prize, braiding Victorian poetry with modern academic romance into a treasure hunt through literature itself. Her fiction overflows with ideas about art, myth, and inherited stories. The sister of novelist Margaret Drabble, she earned a DBE in 1999 and died in 2023, leaving novels that reward rereading.