ANTONIA S. BYATT was born Antonia Drabble in Sheffield (UK) in 1936. Writer and literary critic, she taught English literature at the University College of London. She made her debut in 1978 with the novel The Virgin in the Garden and she achieved literary consecration in 1990 with Possession: A Romance, her most successful book, which was translated all over the world and which earned her the 1990 Booker Prize. Possession, imbued with Victorian flavour, like her following novel Angels & Insects, has soon become a cult and became a film by Neil LaBute. After the tetralogy on Frederica Potter, set in the second half of the 20th century, Byatt is back to bookshops with a brief critical essay and a new novel, which deals with a generation of children from the evening of the Victorian Age to the trenches of the Great War. The novel meditates on the political issues and the theories and aesthetical experimentations of a strongly revolutionary period. A. S. Byatt will take part in the residential project of Incroci di Civiltà and Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia, which will allow her to spend some weeks in Venice and to be inspired by the heritage of the Venetians museums.