British · 1928–2016
Anita Brookner wrote novels of quiet devastation. The British author produced twenty-four books about solitary women navigating disappointment with a precision that belied their apparent modesty. "Hotel du Lac" won the 1984 Booker Prize, depicting a romance novelist exiled to a Swiss hotel after a scandal. Brookner worked as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute until she was fifty-three, then published a novel nearly every year until her death. Her fiction dissected loneliness without sentimentality.