Hermione Lee with Rumaan Alam: Anita Brookner

Overview

Few writers have done more to illuminate the lives of great authors than Hermione Lee.

Widely regarded as one of the world’s preeminent literary biographers, Lee has written acclaimed, definitive accounts of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Tom Stoppard. Now she returns with the first major biography of the Booker Prize-winning novelist and pioneering art historian Anita Brookner.

Drawing on extensive archival research, letters, diaries, and interviews, Lee traces Brookner’s remarkable path from a groundbreaking career in art history to an extraordinary second act as a novelist. Her first novel, ironically entitled A Start in Life, was published at the age of 53. A Booker Prize followed soon after for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, cementing her reputation as one of Britain’s leading novelists. A private person who worked hard to remain enigmatic, Lee reveals Brookner’s personal character and fierce intellect to contemporary readers for the first time.

With the insight, rigor, and narrative grace that have made her biographies landmarks of literary scholarship, Lee offers a nuanced portrait of a fiercely private writer while making a compelling case for Brookner’s place among the great novelists of the 20th century.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear Lee — a master chronicler of literary lives — as she reveals a great literary artist to a new generation of readers. In illuminating Brookner’s life, Lee offers a master class in the art of biography: how careful attention and a gift for storytelling can bring a singular writer to her rightful place in our literary imagination.

“Hermione Lee is a literary life-writer par excellence.” — The Atlantic