THE mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence is among those to receive honorary degrees at Oxford Brookes University’s graduations.

Baroness Doreen Lawrence set up the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust after her son was killed in a racially motivated attack in 1993, when he was 18.

She was given an OBE in 2003 and made a Life Peer last year.

Honorary degrees are academic awards given by universities to people recognised to have made a contribution to specific fields or to society.

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Booker Prize winner and novelist Hilary Mantel, and 2012 Olympic gold medallist rower Katherine Grainger will also be given the awards by the university next week.

Others include Joanna Simons, chief executive of Oxfordshire County Council, Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, Bahram Bekhradnia, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and David Levin, chairman of Capital Group.

Ms Mantel won her first Booker Prize for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, the first part of a planned trilogy following the life of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

She is the first woman to receive the award twice, having won it again for the 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

Oxford Brookes became the permanent home of the Booker Prize Archive in 2003 which will soon move to the library in the new John Henry Brookes Building.

Brookes’ Vice-Chancellor Prof Janet Beer said: “Each of this year’s recipients for an honorary degree is an exceptional role model for our students.”

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