The English writer AS Byatt, author of “Possession” has died

In 1990 for Possession which remains his most famous novel, had won the Booker Prize. The British writer and literary critic has died at the age of 87 A.S. Byatt. This was confirmed by her publishing house, Chatto & Windus, adding that she passed away peacefully at home surrounded by her family. Family that returns as one of the constant themes of her fiction, to which are then added mythological and symbolic elements that become central in many of her novels.

Nata Antonia Susan Drabble (Byatt was the surname of her first husband, the economist Ian Byatt married in 1959) in 1936, Byatt grew up in Sheffield e York, before studying English a Cambridgea Philadelphia it’s at Oxford. He began teaching at University College London in 1962, publishing his first novel, Shadows of a Sun, two years after. The complicated family relationships found in much of her fiction were already present in this story of a daughter fleeing a domineering father. As well as in her second novel, The Game, which describes a tragic relationship between rival sisters that followed in 1967, appearing two years after her sister, the writer Margaret Drabblehad published his own novel on a similar theme.
Scholar of Romantic and Victorian literature, AS Byatt, was the author of complex and critically acclaimed novels. Since 1983 you have abandoned teaching to dedicate yourself entirely to literary and non-fiction activities. It is from 1978 The virgin in the garden, first volume of a quadrilogy featuring the members of a middle-class family from Yorkshire, the Potters, in particular Frederica Potter, a girl who studies at Cambridge in an era in which women still constitute a small minority in universities, with strong references to D. H. Lawrence.

The story continues with Still life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award and which opens Byatt’s most experimental phase, and The Tower of Babel (1996). The fourth and final novel of the quadrilogy, which begins by describing Great Britain in the mid-1950s and the cultural climate of that period, is A woman whistling (2002).

In reality it is in the middle of this quadrilogy that we can place it Possession her most famous novel, a literary thriller which met with critical acclaim and with which the author won the Booker Prize. The novel, which became a bestseller in both the United Kingdom and the United States, translated into more than 30 languages ​​and which was made into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow in 2002, follows two academics who fall in love with each other while investigating the mysterious relationship between two fictional Victorian poets.

“The secret, I saw, is that if you tell a strong story, you can include whatever else you need to include. So I started inventing a mystery like the ones I read in my childhood,” the writer later said, recalling like reading the The Name of The rose Of Umberto Eco has modified his original idea of ​​an experimental novel.

Among his other works, all published in Italy by Einaudi, we remember: Angels and insects; The genius in the nightingale’s eye; The stories of Matisse; The Thing in the Forest; The children’s book; Ragnarök e Peacock and creeper.