Booker prize-winner Anita Brookner died

The Booker prize-winning British author and renowned art historian Anita Brookner died on 10 March 2016. She was 87.

Brookner, who won the Booker in 1984 for her novel Hotel du Lac, was a bestselling author and wrote more than 25 novels.

Brookner, who in 1967 became the first female to be named a Slade professor of art at Cambridge University, was known for her style and stories centering on the theme of middle-class loneliness, often featuring female protagonists.

In 1990, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She was a Fellow of King's College London and of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

She was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London to a Polish immigrant family. Her family changed the family’s surname to Brookner because of anti-German sentiment in Britain.

Brookner was educated at the private James Allen's Girls' School. In 1949 she received a BA in History from King's College London, and in 1953 a doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Some of her works includes

• A Start in Life, 1981 (her first novel)

• Greuze 1725-1805: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-century Phenomenon (1972)

• Jacques-Louis David (1980)

• A Start in Life (1981, US title The Debut)

• Providence (1982)

• Look at Me (1983)

• Hotel du Lac (1984) (won the Booker Prize)

• Family and Friends (1985)

• Latecomers (1988)

• Lewis Percy (1989)

• The Next Big Thing (2002, US title Making Things Better), longlisted for the Booker Prize

• The Rules of Engagement (2003)

• At The Hairdressers (2011), novella, available as an e-book only

Honours conferred on Brookner

• 1984 Man Booker Prize, Best English Language Novel, Hotel du Lac

• 1990 Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)

• 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Strangers (shortlist)

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