Novelist A.S. Byatt speaks at the Crest Theatre on Wednesday.Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt will be onstage at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Crest Theatre as part of the California Lectures subscription series. She will speak about her work in general and her new novel, "The Children's Book," and lecture on "the creation of made-up documents and the use of real documents (letters and diaries) brought to life in writing the historical novel." Byatt is an international literary figure, a critic and teacher who received the Shakespeare Prize in 2002 and was named a Dame of the British Empire in 1999.