Antonia Susan Byatt

English novelist, short story writer, poet and critic. Author of complex, ambitious, intellectual fiction that is very literary, in both style and content. Best known novel, Possession (1990), traced the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics in parallel with that of two  nineteenth-century poets they are researching. It won the Man Booker Prize and was made into a film in 2002. Morpho Eugenia (2003), a novella, also successfully adapted into film as Angels & Insects. The Children's Book (2009) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Also known for her short stories, which, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy, reflect the tradition of Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning. Named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990 and Dame Commander 1999.