Anita Brookner, the author and art historian who won the 1984 Booker Prize for fiction, has died at the age of 87, it was announced on Tuesday.
Anita Brookner, the author and art historian who won the 1984 Booker Prize for fiction, has died at the age of 87, it was announced on Tuesday.
The novelist, who won the Booker for her novel Hotel du Lac, died peacefully in her sleep on March 10, according to a notice of her death in the Times newspaper.
The only child of secular Polish Jews who settled in London, Brookner was born in 1928.
She studied art history before becoming the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art — the oldest professorship of art at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and London.
After writing several art history books in the 1960s and 1970s, she switched to fiction in the 1980s and won the Booker Prize, one of the English-speaking world’s foremost literary awards. Hotel du Lac, centred on a romance novelist staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, was a surprise winner.
Her novels often involved lonely female protagonists. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one step below a knighthood, in 1990.
Her first novel, A Start in Life, was published in 1981, and she went on to publish a book almost every year for the next three decades. Her most recent work, the novella At The Hairdresser’s, was published in 2011. Her publisher Juliet Annan described Brookner as “an exceptional writer in so many ways”, who was also “a superb art historian” and “erudite critic”.
“Her novels are beautifully written, her sentence structure is pure pleasure,” she said. “But I think what people miss is that her novels are some of the most shocking of the 20th century, for underneath the veneer of novels plots about women failing to marry, failing to see the venal in those around them, failing to make successful lives. She wrote about the biggest fears we have: loneliness and death.”
Annan said her novels were often funny however, as was Brookner, and added: “There are few people, let alone novelists, as intelligent, as intellectually rigorous as she. We will miss her.”
Brookner was a “wonderful writer who had this wonderful lucid prose... She was an icon of my age”, British novelist Jilly Cooper told the Times. She was a “serious, serious writer who was very spare in her prose”.
“I used to watch her at parties and everybody else was getting legless while she was just observing everybody,” said Cooper.
Orange Prize-winning novelist Linda Grant called her an “underrated master of incisive fiction and laser prose”.
Jonathan Coe said he was said to hear the sad news of the “magnificent” Brookner’s death, adding: “A great writer. Hotel du Lac one of the best Booker winners ever in my opinion.”
Author Lady Antonia Fraser said Hotel du Lac was wonderful. “In a strange way it was pathfinding. I much respected her.”
Brookner never married and had no children. At her request there will be no funeral, the notice in the Times said.
