Booker winning author and critic AS Byatt dies at 87

The writer and critic AS Byatt, who explored family, myth and narrative in a career spanning six decades, has died aged 87. Her publisher, Chatto & Windus, confirmed that she died peacefully at home surrounded by her close family.

- Richard Lea Ella Creamer

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, who wrote under the name AS Byatt, wrote complex and critically acclaimed novels, including the Booker prize-winning Possession and her examination of artistic creation, The Children's Book. Over her career, she won a swath of literary awards.

Clara Farmer, her publisher, said: "We mourn her loss but it's a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come."

Born Antonia Drabble in 1936, Byatt grew up in Sheffield and York, before studying English at Cambridge, at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia and at Oxford. She began teaching at University College London in 1962, publishing her first novel, Shadows of a Sun, two years later.