Anita Brookner Has Died

British novelist and art historian Anita Brookner has died. She was 87 years old.

Brookner wrote 25 novels including Hotel du Lac which won the The Man Booker Prize in 1984. “Her triumph was seen by some literary figures as a surprise, as J. G. Ballard’s “Empire of the Sun” had been widely expected to win the prize,” reports The New York Times. Her final book was a novella called At The Hairdresser’s was published Penguin in 2011.

Brookner grew up in London and studied at King’s College, London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She began her career as an art professor and wrote mostly about artists and art history. She explained to The Paris Review that she then decided to try her hand at novel writing. “I wondered how it was done and the only way to find out seemed to be to try and do it,” she said in the 1987 interview.