Julian Barnes remembers his friend Anita Brookner: ‘There was no one remotely like her’
Booker Prize-winner Julian Barnes reflects on the novelist and art historian’s wit and resilience in The Guardian
Anita Brookner
Over the course of 28 years, Anita Brookner wrote 24 books. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her final one, Strangers, in 2009.
Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
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Watch her winning moment
Winner The Booker Prize 1984
- By
- Anita Brookner
- Published by
- Jonathan Cape
Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize-winning novel focuses on a novelist who has taken refuge from life in a hotel on the misty shores of Lake Geneva.
Other nominated books
Darkly comic and deeply sympathetic, Anita Brookner’s novel simply asks: if you were finally free to make your own choices in life, what would you do?
