The literary world was in mourning for Anita Brookner, the celebrated novelist and art historian, who has died.

Brookner, the surprise winner of the Booker prize for fiction in 1984, was 87. She was highly regarded for her style and stories centring on the theme of middle-class loneliness, often featuring female protagonists.

She had been rated a 6-1 outsider when her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, was the unexpected winner of the Booker prize in 1984. Described by the judges as “a work of perfect artifice”, the tale of a heroine coming to terms with loveless solitude at a Swiss hotel eclipsed JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, which had been considered a runaway favourite.

Born into an immigrant family in Herne Hill, south London, in July 1928, Brookner’s Jewish background was to inform much of her writing in later life.

Her parents were Poles who changed their name from Bruckner – “like calling yourself Batehoven,” she said in a Guardian interview in which she confessed to feeling socially invisible. “I am used as a listener by a great many people,” she said.

Brookner studied at King’s College, London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, before becoming, in 1967, the first woman to be named as Slade professor of art at Cambridge University.

While her first books were on art and art history, Brookner spoke in an interview with the Paris Review in 1987 of how she had been motivated by the desire to “try her hand” at a novel, adding: “I wondered how it was done and the only way to find out seemed to be to try and do it.”

Her admirers have included Hilary Mantel, who wrote that Brookner had demonstrated that it was “possible to win a major prize, be widely read and still be undervalued”.

Anita Brookner, January 2001. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

“Brookner is the sort of artist described as minor by people who read her books only once,” Mantel also said in a review of Strangers, Brookner’s 23rd book, in 2009.



“The singular quality of each, as well as the integrity of the project, is established. Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night.”

Later in life, Brookner was candid about her regrets, citing not getting married and not becoming a mother, but saying that the latter was the reason why she continued to be a writer.

Brookner continued to write late into her life and a novella, At the Hairdressers, was published as an e-book in 2011.

Her publisher Juliet Annan, paid tribute to her on Monday night, describing her as working in the tradition of the French novel.

“She also had the most extraordinary effect on people because she had such a highly developed sense of what was morally right,” she added.

“If you were with her you felt that you had to behave a whole lot better, but she was also very, very funny and very self-deprecating.”