Anita Brookner

Brookner was born in London to a family of Polish-Jewish origin that sheltered refugee relatives during the Second World War, and built her first career as an art historian, specializing in French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting and becoming, in 1967, the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship at Cambridge.

She taught for decades at the Courtauld Institute of Art before publishing her debut novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 at fifty-three, then continued at a rate of nearly one novel a year for the rest of her life: more than twenty in total, most examining solitary, self-effacing women watching life happen to others.

Hotel du Lac (1984), in which a jilted romance novelist retreats to a genteel off-season Swiss hotel and weighs a loveless proposal of marriage against continued solitude, won the Booker Prize, controversially beating favorites including Martin Amis's Money. She continued writing and reviewing until shortly before her death in London in 2016.