Vanora Bennett
Writer
Foreign correspondents spend their short working lives wondering what they’re going to do when they’re too old or jaded to go to war zones any more.
After a decade or so of reporting from exotic (though not always glamorous) locations – Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, southeast Asia, and Africa – Vanora Bennett found her answer to that question in the phrase, ‘the past is a foreign country’. She came home to north London and started writing historical novels.
Her first work of fiction, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, was about sixteenth-century England’s move towards Protestantism, seen though the eyes of the German painter Hans Holbein and a less than saintly Thomas More. It was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 2007 and was a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month.
She has since published another two well received novels, Figures in Silk (about women in the medieval silk industry) and Blood Royal (showing Agincourt from the French point of view). Her current work-in-progress is set in a time between the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt, and features Geoffrey Chaucer.
She is also the author of two non-fiction books about Russia. The first is Crying Wolf: The Return to War in Chechnya. The second is a lighter travel book/memoir, The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar.