Hermione Lee on Anita Brookner

This September, we have the supreme pleasure of being joined by leading literary biographer, Hermione Lee for the new - and only - biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian, Anita Brookner.

Hermione Lee reveals the full story of this brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Brookner's marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring.

Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her parents were anxious and unhappy. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival.

For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.

In her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.

Hermione Lee is a biographer, Professor Emeritus of English Literature and former President of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her writings include biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard (2020). She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and in 2024 was made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literary scholarship and literature. She lives in Oxford.