Who won the 1990 Booker Prize for Possession?
Answer
A. S. Byatt
Who won the 1990 Booker Prize for Possession? The answer is A. S. Byatt.
A. S. Byatt won the 1990 Booker Prize for Possession: A Romance, a novel that combines academic mystery, Victorian pastiche, romance and literary criticism. Its modern protagonists, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, investigate the concealed relationship between two fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.
The novel’s title points to several kinds of possession: romantic desire, scholarly obsession, the ownership of letters and manuscripts, and the way the past can seem to claim the present. Byatt invented poems, diaries and correspondence for the book, giving its fictional literary history the texture of a genuine archive.
Readers sometimes confuse the winner with Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels or Hilary Mantel, who appeared among the 1990 judges rather than as the winning author. Possession later reached a wider audience through a 2002 film adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart and Jeremy Northam.