Booker Prize-winning author Anita Brookner’s shock triumph in 1984 was “disastrous and life-changing”, her biographer has revealed.
Hermione Lee told The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival that following Brookner’s unexpected victory, some colleagues at the Courtauld Institute of Art were “jealous and resentful”, and urged the novelist to accept a pay cut, work part-time or retire.
The revelation features in Lee’s new biography, Anita Brookner: Art and Life, which examines the complex life of the British novelist and academic, who died in 2016 aged 87.
Brookner, who won £15,000 when Hotel du Lac got the Booker Prize, had only begun writing fiction in her fifties, publishing her debut novel, A Start in Life, in 1981.
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