Anita Brookner, art historian and award-winning novelist has died aged 87, the Guardian reports. Brookner began her career as an art historian, specialising in French Romanticism. She was the first woman to hold the title of Slade professor of art at Cambridge University. Brookner was promoted to the position of Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1977, where she continued to work until her retirement in 1988. She was awarded a CBE in 1990. As a novelist, she wrote her first novel A Start in Life (1981) when she was 53 and won the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac, published in the same year.
15 March 2016.
