Novelist and art historian, Dr Anita Brookner, was born in London on 16 July 1928. She studied at King's College, London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She spent three years studying in Paris as a postgraduate, and went on to lecture in art at Reading University and the Courtauld Institute, where she specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. She became the first woman to be named as Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University in 1967.Her first novel, A Start in Life, was published in 1981. Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was adapted for television in 1986. The Bay of Angels (2001), concerns a single woman coming to terms with a new sense of freedom when her widowed mother re-marries and moves abroad. The Rules of Engagement (2003), her twenty-second novel, is a story about friendship and choices.A Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge, Anita Brookner lives in London. She was made a CBE in 1990. Her most recent non-fiction book is Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000), and her most recent novel is Strangers (2009).