Dame A.S. Byatt was educated at York and at Newnham College, Cambridge. She taught at the Central School of Art and Design and was Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London, before returning to full-time writing in 1983. Her novel Possession won the Booker Prize and Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1990. Her other fiction includes Babel Tower, Angels and Insects, and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Her critical works include Degrees of Freedom, a study of the novels of Iris Murdoch, and Passions of the Mind (selected essays).