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Information about Sarah Dunant

Sarah Dunant (born Linda Dunant 8 August, 1950, in London, England) is the author of many international bestsellers, most recently The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan.

She attended Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, London and read history at Newnham College, Cambridge and has worked in theatre, radio and television. The Birth of Venus is now being made into a film. She lives in London for most of the year.

Early career

Sarah Dunant began as a writer for publications like Spare Rib and many other publications. As a broadcaster she was one of the principles responsible for hosting The Late Show on BBC2 and has also presented Woman's Hour and A Good Read on Radio4.

The Books

Sarah Dunant's work ranges over a number of genres and eras, going from hard-boiled detective fiction to historical thriller. Her narratives are hard to categorise due to their inventive treatment of time and space, and a favoured device of hers is to run two or more plot strands concurrently, as she does to great effect in Mapping the Edge. A common concern running through her work is women's perceptions and points of view, but the serious stuff is always embedded deep below the surface. Her work is polished and taut, and her handling of narrative pace is nearly always impeccable.

Her characters are frequently women of the world, able to hold their own against men and open to sexual experimentation and rule-breaking, which drives a lot of her plots' energy. This is probably because even when she sets her story in Renaissance Florence, as she does in The Birth of Venus, the 'whodunit' plot construct still persists, and the quest to solve a mystery or a crime carries on alongside the emotional involvements of the characters. Having said that, it would not be adequate to say that she writes 'thrillers', since there is much more to be found in the books than generic thriller-type entertainment.

Hannah Wolfe

Sarah Dunant is the creator of the female private detective Hannah Wolfe who features in the trilogy Birth Marks, Fatlands and Under my Skin. Superficially genre fiction, these books nevertheless show the experimental boldness that characterises Dunant's later works. In Birth Marks Hannah sets out to investigate the death of a young girl who is eight months pregnant, and is drawn into a gripping story involving the ethics of surrogate motherhood. Fatlands has Hannah playing nursemaid to the difficult teenage daughter of a scientist. As she investigates the Vandamed Corporation she is caught between the ethics of large scale industrial animal experimentation and the concerns of NGOs and activists on the other. In Under My Skin Hannah ends up at a health farm and in the process of investigating a series of sabotage attacks, confronts issues to do with the beauty industry and women's relationships with their bodies. Hannah herself is a hard-boiled, wisecracking, tough character in the hard-core tradition of detective fiction, but with her own individual twists. She could be compared with Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski and Cordelia Grey in P. D. James's works, but she is closer to Ellery Queen, Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret or Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in her attitude to her work and the 'feel' of her character.

Bibliography

  • Exterminating Angels (with Peter Busby as Peter Dunant), 1983
  • Intensive Care (with Peter Busby as Peter Dunant), 1986
  • Snow Storms in a Hot Climate, 1988
  • Birth Marks, 1991
  • Fatlands, 1993
  • The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, 1995
  • Under My Skin, 1995
  • The Age of Anxiety, 1996
  • Transgressions, 1997
  • Mapping the Edge, 1999
  • The Birth of Venus, 2003
  • In the Company of the Courtesan, 2006

See also

Awards

August 8 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events

  • 1220 - Sweden was defeated by Estonian tribes in the Battle of Lihula.

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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1920s  1930s  1940s  - 1950s -  1960s  1970s  1980s
1947 1948 1949 - 1950 - 1951 1952 1953

Year 1950 (MCML
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London
Canary Wharf is the centre of London's modern office towers
London shown within England
Coordinates:
Sovereign state United Kingdom
Constituent country England
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Motto
Dieu et mon droit   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen".
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The Birth of Venus: Love and Death in Florence is a 2003 novel by Sarah Dunant, a bestselling British author. The plot is one of passion, politics, and danger. It features a young girl, Alessandra Cecchi, who is drawn to a young painter commissioned to paint the family's
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The Godolphin and Latymer School

Motto Francha Leale Toge (Free and Loyal Art Thou)

Established 1861

Type Independent all-female
Headmistress Ms.
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Newnham College

                     
College name Newnham College
Named after Newnham Village
Established 1871
Previously named Newnham Hall
Location
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For other meanings please see Spare rib (disambiguation).
Spare Rib was a feminist magazine in the United Kingdom that emerged as a consequence of meetings involving, amongst others, Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe in 1971.
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The Late Show (1989–1995) was a British television arts magazine programme broadcast on BBC Two weeknights at 11.15pm — directly after Newsnight — often referred to as the "graveyard slot" in terms of television scheduling.
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Woman's Hour is a magazine programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the United Kingdom.

Created by Norman Collins and originally presented by Alan Ivimey the programme was first broadcast on 7 October 1946 on the BBC's Light Programme (now called Radio 2).
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A Good Read is one of BBC Radio 4's longest running programmes where two guests and the main presenter (currently Sue MacGregor) choose their favourite book. Collectively they review the titles. The books are always paperbacks, in print and the reviews are honest.
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Renaissance (French for "rebirth"; Italian: Rinascimento; Spanish: Renacimiento), was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th through the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe.
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Country Italy
Region Tuscany
Province Florence (FI)
Mayor Leonardo Domenici (Democrats of the Left)

Area km
Population
 - Total (as of 2006-06-02)
 - Density /km

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Sara Paretsky (b. June 8, 1947 in Ames, Iowa) is a contemporary American author of detective fiction. Paretsky was raised in Kansas. She graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in political science.
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Victoria Iphigenia “Vic” Warshawski is a fictional character in a series of detective novels and short stories by Sara Paretsky. She is a gritty Chicago private investigator. Nearly every novel and short story in the series is written with V.I.
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Cordelia Gray is the main protagonist of P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and of The Skull Beneath the Skin.

She is a strong and independent British woman who inherits a detective agency.
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Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 3 August, 1920) is an English writer of crime fiction, under the name P. D. James, and is a life peer in the British House of Lords.
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Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn, New York: Daniel (David) Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (October 20, 1905–September 3, 1982) and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee
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Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (French IPA: [ʒɔʀʒ sim'nɔ̃]) (February 13, 1903–September 4, 1989) was a Belgian writer who wrote in French.
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Jules Maigret, known as (Commissaire) Maigret to most people, including his wife, is a fictional police detective, created by writer Georges Simenon.

Some of his trademark features are his pipes, his mixed approach to detecting (at times relying on pure intuition, at
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Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett
Born: May 27 1894(1894--)
Saint Mary's County, Maryland
Died: January 10 1961 (aged 68)
New York City, New York
Occupation: Novelist
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Sam Spade is a fictional character who is the protagonist of the novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) and the various movies and adaptations based on it. The character was created by Dashiell Hammett, and the novel was first published as a serial in the pulp magazine
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The Gold Dagger Award was an award given annually by the Crime Writers' Association for best crime novel of the year.

For its first five years, it was known as the Crossed Red Herring Award.
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