‘Anita Brookner: Art & Life’: A Biographical Conversation between Professor Dame Hermione Lee and Dr Kate Kennedy

Anita Brookner: Art & Life

A Biographical Conversation between

Professor Dame Hermione Lee and Dr Kate Kennedy

Book Launch & OCLW Fifteenth Anniversary Celebration

On the fifteenth anniversary of The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, join us to celebrate the launch of its founding Director, Professor Dame Hermione Lee’s new biography, Anita Brookner: Art & Life.

In Anita Brookner: Art & Life (Chatto & Windus), Professor Dame Hermione Lee examines the life and work of the award-winning novelist and distinguished art historian. Born in South London in 1928 to a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, Brookner spent much of her early life caring for her mother before becoming an influential scholar and teacher—the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge. In her fifties, she began writing fiction, including her novel Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize in 1984.

It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual […] piercingly intelligent […] Lee’s biography […] has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind. 

—The Observer

Brookner was a formidable intellectual, whose fiction offered quiet, incisive studies of solitary and emotionally restrained characters—often middle-class women—navigating loneliness, disappointment, and small eruptions of desire beneath a façade of reserve. While critics have often associated Brookner with her protagonists, as Hermione Lee demonstrates, Brookner was their inventor, not their alter ego.

At her death in 2016, Brookner left behind twenty-five novels, several volumes of art history, and a wealth of criticism. But very few personal papers survived. She was a private person who wanted to keep herself hidden and to remain enigmatic. Hermione's biography therefore raises fundamental questions about the possibilities and limits of biographical writing.

How do you reconstruct a life when so much of it remains hidden?

What can the surviving traces of a life reveal, and where must a biographer acknowledge uncertainty?

In conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy, Hermione will discuss Anita Brookner’s life and work, the challenges of writing about her, and the particular surprises and discoveries that arose during the research. More broadly, they will consider the processes of researching, structuring, and writing biography.

This astute and tireless biography succeeds, against the odds, in unearthing the author.

—The Guardian

This conversation will appeal to readers and writers of biography and life-writing, and to anyone interested in the life and work of Anita Brookner, literary and art history, and the practice of biography. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

Speaker Details:

Professor Dame Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a literary biographer, and her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography), Tom Stoppard (2020), and Anita Brookner (2026). She has also written and edited books on life-writing, including A Very Short Introduction to Biography, a collection of essays, Body Parts, and (with Dr Kate Kennedy) Lives of Houses. In 2023, she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW in 2011.

Dr Kate Kennedy is a writer, cellist, and BBC broadcaster. Her work combines words and music, in performance, on the radio, and on the page. She is a Research Fellow in Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Her most recent book, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound (2024), is part memoir, part biography, and her previous biography, Dweller in Shadows (2021), explored the life of British poet-composer Ivor Gurney. She is a regular presenter for BBC Radio.

Celebrating 15 Years of OCLW

This book launch coincides with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing's fifteenth anniversary.

Professor Dame Hermione Lee founded OCLW in 2011 with a vision of creating a place where the study and practice of life-writing could flourish. Over the past fifteen years, the Centre has grown into an internationally recognised hub for research, conversation and creative practice in life-writing, bringing writers, scholars and the wider public together.

As we celebrate this milestone, we need your support to secure the Centre’s future. Every lecture, workshop, scholarship and visiting fellowship depends on philanthropic support, and with funding for the humanities under increasing pressure, your support is more important than ever.

Help us keep life-writing open to all.

Find out more about our Fifteenth Anniversary Director’s Appeal and help us secure the future of life-writing for generations to come.

Further Details and Contacts:

Join us after the launch for a book sale by Caper.

This book launch is free and open to all. If you are able, please consider donating £5, £10, £20, or more to support OCLW’s free events, outreach activities, and programmes, helping us keep life-writing open to all.  Donations can be made when booking your place or via our online donations portal. Every gift makes a difference. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is required. Registration will close at 14:30 on 03/11/2026.

This is an in-person event. The event will not be recorded.

Following the book launch, we will be holding a private reception for Friends and Patrons of OCLW to celebrate our 15th Anniversary. If you would like to become a Friend or Patron and support OCLW’s work on an ongoing basis, please find details here.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.