Anita Brookner (Author) Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and after holding a post as a professor at Cambridge University and spending several years in Paris, she worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner published a number of volumes of art criticism. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. She died in 2016 at the age of 87.Hermione Lee (Introducer) HERMIONE LEE is a biographer, Professor Emeritus of English Literature and former President of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her writings include biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020). She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and in 2024 was made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literary scholarship and literature. She lives in Oxford.

Hotel du Lac: Brookner's most absorbing novel…wryly realistic…graceful and attractive.

Anita Brookner (Author) Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and after holding a post as a professor at Cambridge University and spending several years in Paris, she worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner published a number of volumes of art criticism. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. She died in 2016 at the age of 87.Hermione Lee (Introducer) HERMIONE LEE is a biographer, Professor Emeritus of English Literature and former President of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her writings include biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020). She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and in 2024 was made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literary scholarship and literature. She lives in Oxford.

Hotel du Lac: Brookner's most absorbing novel…wryly realistic…graceful and attractive.

Anita Brookner (Author) Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and after holding a post as a professor at Cambridge University and spending several years in Paris, she worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner published a number of volumes of art criticism. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. She died in 2016 at the age of 87.Hermione Lee (Introducer) HERMIONE LEE is a biographer, Professor Emeritus of English Literature and former President of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her writings include biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020). She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and in 2024 was made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literary scholarship and literature. She lives in Oxford.

Hotel du Lac: Brookner's most absorbing novel…wryly realistic…graceful and attractive.