Described by the Sunday Telegraph as 'one of Britain's foremost grandes dames of the writing world', A S Byatt was born in 1936 and studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College in the United States and Somerville College, Oxford. She has written numerous works of fiction including The Virgin in the Garden (1978); Possession: A Romance (1990), for which she won the Booker Prize; Angels and Insects (1992) and The Children's Book (2009). She was made a Fellow of University College London in 2004 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017.