Research Triangle Park, N.C.  Renowned novelist A. S. Byatt will appear at the National Humanities Center at 8:00 p.m., Friday, October 16, in conversation with noted literary scholar Toril Moi from Duke University.

Byatt's novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer's Tale, and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman. Her most recent novel, The Children's Book, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in the U.K., and is now being published in the U.S. Her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Elementals, and Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A. S. Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and professor of English, professor of theater studies, and director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke University. Her most recent book, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2006), won the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the best book in Comparative Literary Studies in 2007. Moi was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1994-95.

Byatt will also appear in the Triangle area on Thursday, October 15, at 7:30 p.m. in the Gothic Reading Room in Perkins Library at Duke University for a public reading (for details http://www.duke.edu/web/philartslit/events.html).

Byatt's visit to the National Humanities Center is made possible through the Meymandi Fellowship for distinguished visitors which, in recent years, has also brought to the Center such distinguished visitors as E. O. Wilson, Michael Pollan, Mark Stoneking, and Oliver Sacks.

Please note: This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. To register for this event contact Martha Johnson at mjohnson@nationalhumanitiescenter.org.