Sarah Dunant

Sarah Dunant (born August 8, 1950 in London ) is a British writer and longtime journalist .

Life

After studying history , Sarah Dunant worked for many years as a press, radio and television journalist for the BBC, among others . Until 1997 she was a presenter for the Woman's Hour on Radio 4 and on BBC Television for The Late Show . At Newnham College of the University of Cambridgeshe also had a teaching position as a university lecturer in history. A long stay abroad took her to the USA and Central and South America. After her return to Great Britain, the adventurous British worked as an actress for a few months, among other things. In 1974 she started as an editor ( producer ) for BBC Radio. In the early 1980s she decided to work as a freelance writer on thrillers and historical novels . Some of them became international bestsellers . Several of her books, including The Birth of Venus , have accordingly become literary models for feature films. She still earns part of her living as a journalist. She has been writing her own columns and literary reviews for years , including in the national British quality newspapers The Times and The Observer . She has been the regular presenter of the BBC Radio 3 program Night Waves for many years .

Sarah Dunant has two children and lives alternately in London and Florence.

Literary profile

Sarah Dunant's literary areas of interest are varied. They range from contemporary thrillers to hard-boiled private investigators crime novels to essays , non-fiction and historical novels. One of her stylistic devices is to intermittently interweave two or more narrative strands, for example in Mapping the Edge . A constant feature in her work is the emphasis or inclusion of female points of view and modes of perception .

Their protagonists are often urbane female personalities from the middle of educated society. As such, they are able to assert themselves independently against male players and opponents. At the same time, these women are quite open to sexual experiments and exploring borders. Dunant's plot plots draw a lot of energy from this. When she lets the novel set in the Florence of the Renaissance , for example in The Birth of Venus , the Whodunit strand of the criminal case embedded in it adds to the tension, as does the emotional entanglements of the characters. In this respect, the generally accepted classification of Sarah Dunant's fictional works as genre literature is not necessarily appropriate. Her younger Scottish writer colleague Louise Welsh takes a somewhat similar literary approach .

In her historical novel Venetian Secrets , which was published in 2006 almost simultaneously in the English-language original and in the German-language translation , Sarah Dunant once again turns to her last preferred age, the up-and-coming cultural epoch of the cities in northern Italy of the Renaissance.

Sarah Dunant has been the patron of the Orange Prize for Fiction for many years . Her responsibility for The Late Show also included the annual TV presentation of the Booker Prize for Fiction ceremony until 1997 .

Hannah Wolfe

Sarah Dunant is the creator of an unusual female private investigator character named Hannah Wolfe . This plays the leading role in the trilogy of Birth Marks , Fatlands and Under my Skin . On the surface, these are genre novels. Even these early detective novels show the boldness of experimentation that also characterizes Dunant's later works. In The Baby Pact (original: Birth Marks ) Hannah undertakes to investigate the death of a young girl in the eighth month of pregnancy. This draws her into a gripping story that addresses the controversial ethics of surrogacy .

In Fette Weide (original: Fatlands ) the starting point is that Hannah temporarily plays nanny for the difficult, pubescent daughter of a scientist. When she has to investigate what the Vandamed Corporation is all about , she suddenly finds herself in a bind between the economic concerns of animal testing on a large scale and the ethical demands of NGOs and activists. In With Skin and Hair (original: Under My Skin ), Hannah comes half by accident in a wellness hotel complex to the task of clearing up a series of acts of sabotage there. The underlying issue is the connection between the beauty industry and the often complicated relationship women have with their bodies. Hannah herself is a hard-boiled , quick-witted and actionable personality in the hard-core tradition of the detective novel, but has very own, individual traits. Hannah Wolfe could be compared to Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski or Cordelia Gray in PD James novels, but she is more like the characters in Ellery Queen or Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in the inner attitude to their work and in the feeling of their character.

Awards

• British Crime Writers Association ( CWA ) 1993 Silver Dagger Award for Crime Fiction for Fatlands
• for her acting role in The Late Show for a BAFTA TV Award nominations
• 2010 nomination for the Walter Scott Prize for Sacred Hearts .

Works

• Der Palast der Borgia , Berlin 2014. ISBN 978-3-458-36033-9 (Original title: Blood and Beauthy ), 2013
• Venetian secrets . Bergisch Gladbach 2006. ISBN 978-3-7857-1583-3 (Original title: In the Company of the Courtesan , 2006)
• The Birth of Venus , 2003
• Mapping the Edge , 1999 (German: When Anna disappeared, Munich 2000)
• Transgressions , 1997 (German: At night all hangovers are gray Munich 1997 318 p.)
• The Age of Anxiety , 1996
• Under My Skin , 1995
• The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate , 1995
• Fatlands , 1993
• Birth Marks , 1991
• Snow Storms in a Hot Climate , 1988
• Intensive Care (with Peter Busby under the pseudonym Peter Dunant ), 1986
• Racheengel , Berlin (Rotbuch Verlag) 1987 (original title: Exterminating Angels , with Peter Busby under the pseudonym Peter Dunant ), 1983.

Web links

• Literature by and about Sarah Dunant in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Biography of Sarah Dunant at contemporarywriters.com ( Memento from June 6, 2011 in the Internet Archive )