Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Anita Brookner, art historian and Booker prize winner, dies age 87

Author and first female Slade professor of art published 24 novels including Hotel du Lac, which won her the Booker prize in 1984

Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner, photographed in 1990. Photograph: Jonathan Player/REX/Shutterstock
The literary world was in mourning for Anita Brookner, the celebrated novelist and art historian, who has died.
Brookner, the surprise winner of the Booker prize for fiction in 1984, was 87. She was highly regarded for her style and stories centring on the theme of middle-class loneliness, often featuring female protagonists.

She had been rated a 6-1 outsider when her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, was the unexpected winner of the Booker prize in 1984. Described by the judges as “a work of perfect artifice”, the tale of a heroine coming to terms with loveless solitude at a Swiss hotel eclipsed JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, which had been considered a runaway favourite.
Born into an immigrant family in Herne Hill, south London, in July 1928, Brookner’s Jewish background was to inform much of her writing in later life   MORE

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