Join acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee talking to journalist Suzi Feay about about her groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner.
Born in south London in 1928 and the only child of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants, Anita Brookner lived alone nursing her invalid mother and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival.
She worked at the Courtauld Institute for many years before beginning to write fiction in her 50s. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.
A novelist like no other, she was an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic : a highly respected art historian and critic as well as an acclaimed novelist. Her fiction earned her a devoted following, but it also divided opinion, with some readers finding her unsentimental view of life challenging or even unsettling.
Hermione Lee is a biographer, Professor Emeritus of English Literature and former President of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is renowned for her biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard.
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.