Sarah Dunant

She went on to work extensively in radio and television, most notably as a presenter of BBC2’s late night live arts programme, The Late Show in the 1990s and Night Waves, BBC Radio 3’s nightly cultural discussion programme.

She contributes regularly to radio, and is an occasional presenter for BBC Radio 4’s opinion slot "Point of View".

In 2016, she was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Oxford Brookes University, where she is a guest lecturer on the Creative writing M.A. course.

In 2010 Sacred Hearts was shortlisted for the first Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize, an award which highlighted the growing power and popularity of the form.

In 2000, an extended visit to Florence changed her working life. In what she acknowledged was something of a midlife crisis, her old passion for history was reignited, and she started to research the impact of the Renaissance on the city in the 1490s. The result was The Birth of Venus, the first of a trilogy of novels about women’s lives in the Italian Renaissance. The commercial success of these books in America and elsewhere allowed Dunant to devote herself full time to writing and research, concentrating on the most current work being done in Renaissance studies, most particularly concerning the lives of women. The novel Sacred Hearts, a story of nuns in an enclosed convent in 16th Ferrara, led to collaboration with the early music group, Musica Secreta: a theatrical adaptation using the music of the period and with a choir, performed in churches and at early music festivals around Britain.

Her crime novels were three times shortlisted for the CWA Golden dagger award, and in 1994 she won a silver dagger for Fatlands.

In the 1990s, she wrote a trilogy around a British female private eye Hannah Wolfe, spotlighting issues like surrogacy, cosmetic surgery, animal rights, and violence to women. Sexual violence was also at the centre of "Transgressions" (based on a mysterious series of incidents happening in her house which tackled what might happen if a woman woke to an intruder in her house and live to tell the tale. The resulting furore over the actions of the heroine "caused the book to become a cause celebre which triggered a debate about rape and popular culture".

She worked at BBC Radio 4 for two years in London, producing its then arts magazine Kaleidoscope, before travelling again, this time overland through North, Central and South America, a trip that became research material for her first solo novel Snow Storms in Hot Climate (1988), a thriller about the early cocaine trade in Colombia.

Dunant started writing in her late twenties, first with a friend, with whom she produced two political thrillers and a five-part BBC1 drama series - Thin Air, starring Kate Hardie, Nicky Henson and Clive Merrison, broadcast in 1988 - before going solo.

Sarah Dunant (born 8 August 1950) is a British novelist, journalist, broadcaster, and critic. She is married with two daughters, and lives in London and Florence.

Dunant was born in 1950 and raised in London. She is the daughter of David Dunant, a former Welsh airline steward who later became manager of British Airways, and his French wife Estelle, who grew up in Bangalore, India.