Anita Brookner (1928 – )

In 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge University. Since 1977, she has been associated with the Courtauld Institute of Art. However, since winning the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac, she has become better known as a novelist. Her fiction is mostly set in London, and often involves characters of Jewish extraction, like herself. Her works explore the alienation of a character, usually female, whose quiet, solitary lives are punctuated by destitution and disappointments in love. Her style has often borne her comparisons with Jane Austen and Henry James.