Hermione Lee in Conversation

The much-acclaimed, award-winning literary biographer Hermione Lee will be in conversation about her latest work which recounts the life of the Booker Prize winning author, Anita Brookner.This event is a wonderful opportunity to find out about an intriguing novelist, and also an incredible biographer!Though best known for 'Hotel du Lac' for which she won the Booker Prize in 1984 (triumphing over JG Ballard and Julian Barnes), Anita Brookner wrote some 24 novels.She has wrongly been associated in her work and her life with 'lonely, cardiganed' women 'pining for love'.

In fact she was an enigmatic individual whose writing style was 'characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia'.

Her fiction was 'engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more'.Brookner was a renowned teacher of Art History at the Courtauld Institute and the Slade and only became a novelist in 1981 when she was 53.

That first novel was 'A Start in Life' and she won the Booker just three years later.

She subsequently published a novel each year until 'Strangers' in 2010.Hermione Lee will be in conversation with Catherine Larner about how she interrogated the life of this very private writer to reveal her friendships and foibles, and to celebrate the achievement of her writing anew.Hermione's previous work has included the lives of Tom Stoppard, Penelope Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Edith Wharton, and this is sure to be a fascinating, enlightening and entertaining event.Tickets are 26 to include a signed copy of the book, presented at the event.You may purchase a ticket without the book for 15 which is redeemable towards the cover price of the book (RRP 28) on the day.