Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) was an English novelist and art historian, born in Herne Hill, London, to Polish Jewish parents. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art, becoming in 1967 the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge. She published her debut novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and went on to write a novel almost every year for two decades; her fourth, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize in 1984.