People like A.S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (née Drabble; born 24 August 1936), known professionally by her former marriage name as A. S. Byatt ( BY-ət), is an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been widely translated, into more than thirty languages.

After attending the University of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved to Durham. It was during Byatt's time at university that she began work on her first two novels, subsequently published by Chatto & Windus as Shadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun) and The Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job in 1972 so as to help pay for the education of her only son. In the same week she accepted, a drunk driver killed her son as he walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt spent a symbolic 11 years teaching (the same length of time as her son had lived), then began full-time writing in 1983. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet, a tetralogy of novels that continued with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).