Anita Brookner, 1985 (photo)

Anita Brookner (b. 1928) Popular English novelist and art historian. Her first novel, A Start In Life, was published in 1981, when she was 53. In 1984 she won the Booker Prize with Hotel du Lac. Since then she has published a novel approximately every year. Other titles include Latecomers (1988), A Family Romance (1993) and Visitors (1997). Her novels explore themes of emotional loss and feelings of alienation from society. In 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge and from 1977 to 1988 she was a Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 1990 she was made a CBE for services to literature.