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.
The Booker Prize 1984
Towards the end of a long career as an art historian, Anita Brookner turned to fiction and Hotel du Lac, her fourth novel, triumphed over a heavyweight Booker Prize shortlist.
Brookner herself was surprised: she had thought J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun would win and claimed, in very Brooknerish fashion, that the first thing she’d do with the prize money would be to have her shoes resoled. She went on to be a prolific novelist; over the next two decades publishing almost a book a year.
Her fiction, often dealing with lonely and alienated women, was both timeless and stylish and The Next Big Thing won her a place on the Man Booker Prize longlist in 2002.
Watch the ceremony highlights
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.
The Shortlist
J.G. Ballard’s heartrending account of a young British boy’s four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War.
By J.G. Ballard
As Julian Barnes’ enigmatic narrator investigates the life and art of Flaubert, so he reveals his own secrets in this witty weave of fact and fiction.
A frustrated small-town scholar lands the opportunity of a lifetime, but only encounters more frustration in Anita Desai’s touching comic novel.
By Anita Desai
A respectable married man becomes unstuck in Penelope Lively’s witty take on love, literature and the dangers of middle-aged folly.
In the second book of his ‘campus’ trilogy, David Lodge chronicles the pursuit of passion and the search for the holy grail of academic perks.
By David Lodge
