A. S. Byatt

Byatt was the elder sister of novelist Margaret Drabble, and the two maintained a famously guarded, often estranged relationship for decades, each declining for years to read the other's books. She spent years teaching English literature at university before turning to fiction full-time, bringing a scholar's command of the Victorian canon into her own novels.

Possession, pairing two present-day academics chasing a hidden Victorian love affair with pastiche poems and letters she wrote herself in period voice, won the Booker Prize and became her best-known book, later filmed with Gwyneth Paltrow. She continued the loosely linked Frederica Potter quartet begun with The Virgin in the Garden across four decades, alongside criticism and further fiction, and was made a Dame for services to literature. She died in 2023.