Bookforum talks with A.S. Byatt

The prolific A. S. Byatt has been publishing novels since the mid-'60s (her first, The Shadow of the Sun, came out in 1964), but it wasn't until 1990, when she won the Booker Prize for Possession—the story of a pair of contemporary scholars whose research on two Victorian poets reveals an extramarital affair between them—that she became an international (literary) household name. But Dame Byatt, who was awarded the DBE ten years ago (and the CBE nine years earlier), credits not the Booker Prize but the Web with her considerably raised profile: "Everything I say or write is now perpetuated and