Sarah Dunant

Sarah Dunant (b. 1950) was born in London and studied history at Cambridge University. After a short stint as an actress, she lived and worked in Japan, and traveled widely in Asia before returning to London to start work with the BBC as a cultural journalist. For the next twenty-five years, she ran two simultaneous careers: presenting and producing arts programs for television and radio; and writing novels, screenplays, contemporary thrillers, and a set of three crime novels starring PI Hannah Wolfe. During the late 1990s, Dunant returned to her first love, history, and throughout the last fifteen years has produced five novels set during the Italian renaissance, fusing cutting-edge historical research with dynamic story lines. The first three investigated the lives of women, as mothers, wives, courtesans, and nuns. Her most recent, Blood and Beauty, dramatizes the real history—as opposed to popular myths—of the Borgia family and the remarkable period of Italian history in which they lived. The as-yet-untitled sequel will be published in early 2017. She has taught renaissance studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and is a tutor in the creative writing masters program at Oxford Brookes University, where she is about to be awarded a doctorate of letters. Dunant has lectured at festivals and conferences around the world and is an accredited lecturer with NADFAS (National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Society) in the UK.