Novelist and art historian. Brookner’s novels have been described as “gloomy. ” Already in her 50’s when her first novel was published, she won the prestigious Brooker literary prize for her fourth, Hotel du Lac, published in 1984.

Her parents were Jewish immigrants to Britain, who changed their name from Bruckner.  She once told the Paris Review, “My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that. They were transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood…” During WWII, her family tried to help refugees from war-torn Europe.