Hermione Lee on Anita Brookner

The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers. Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Anita Brookner's marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring.

Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment.

For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac. Since then, novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.

She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following.

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.