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Booker winner Anita Brookner dies, aged 87

Updated / Tuesday, 15 Mar 2016 16:33
Hotel Du Lac author Anita Brookner has died
Hotel Du Lac author Anita Brookner has died

The writer and art historian Anita Brookner, author of the Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac, has died. She was 87.

A death notice in the London Times said she died peacefully in her sleep on March 10.

Born in London in 1928, Dr Brookner was the daughter of Polish immigrants. She studied at King's College, London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University in 1967.

She was in her fifties when she published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981, and three years later won the Booker for Hotel du Lac.

The story of a romance novelist who is spending time on the shores of Lake Geneva, Hotel du Lac was adapted for television in 1986 with Anna Massey in the lead role of Edith Hope. The BBC production was nominated for nine BAFTAs.

Among Anita Brookner's other works were A Friend from England, Brief Lives, Visitors, Falling Slowly, Undue Influence and The Next Big Thing.

Her final novel, Strangers, was published in 2009, with a novella, At The Hairdressers, published as an ebook two years later.

Tributes to the author have poured in on Twitter.

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