A.S. Byatt, the author and writer whose 1990 novel, "Possession" won the Booker Prize and made her a global literary name, died Friday at the age of 87, according to a statement from her publisher. She wrote 11 novels, beginning with "The Shadow of the Sun," published in 1964, as well as six short story collections and six works of scholarly criticism.  

"We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Dame Antonia Byatt, one of the most significant writers and critics of our time," said the statement from Chatto & Windus.

"Possession," a postmodern novel full of dazzling touches, follows two contemporary scholars investigating the lives of fictional Victorian English poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The novel was called a "gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance." Byatt's 2009 novel "The Children's Book," was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

"My book was written on a kind of high about the pleasures of reading," she said of "Possession" when accepting the prize.

"She could hold the germ of a story in her head for a long time, sometimes for years, but when it emerged she would work on it assiduously in her notebooks and in conversations, reading widely to clarify the background of intellectual movements and artistic ideas, and mapping every scene in detail in her head, from the colours of clothes and the names of minor characters - which were often bizarre - to the complexity of train timetables," said her longtime editor Jenny Uglow.

Byatt was born in Antonia Susan Drabble in 1936, in York. She studied Newnham College, Cambridge, and Bryn Mawr College, the did postgraduate study at Somerville College in Oxford. In 1959, she married economist Ian Byatt, divorcing in 1969 after having a daughter and a son together. She married Peter Duffy, an investment analyst, later that same year, and had two daughters with him. In 1972, Charles, 11, was struck and killed by a car while walking home from school, a defining tragedy in her life. Byatt left academia in 1983 to write full time, and later told the New York Times:

"I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically."

Her early books were often unfavorably compared to those written by her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, with whom she had a testy, distant relationship.

Byatt's reach into popular culture was surprisingly broad for a writer whose work was often complex and intricate, full of long sentences and challenging detail. In 2002, a film version of "Possession" was released to generally positive reviews. "Angels and Insects," a novella in her 1992 collection "Morpho Eugenia," got the film treatment in 19995, with Mark Rylance and Kristen Scott Thomas as its stars. "Mad Max" director George Miller made "Three Thousand Years of Longing," inspired by Byatt's 11995 story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye."

In 1999, Byatt was named a dame, equivalent to a knighthood, by Queen Elizabeth II, for services to literature. In 2003 she was made a chevalier (knight) of France's Order of Arts and Letters.

Zoë Waldie, her literary agent, said "Antonia used to say that making things out of language was the most exciting thing she knew. She did this magnificently over many decades and held readers spellbound."