From reporting to fiction
Vanora Bennett is an author and journalist whose work spans conflict reporting, non-fiction and historical novels.
After studying Russian, she joined Reuters. Reporting assignments took her to Cambodia, Angola and Mozambique, and then to the former Soviet Union. During the early 1990s she covered conflicts in the Caucasus and the war in Chechnya.
Her journalism has appeared in The Times, the Los Angeles Times, Prospect and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. In 2004 she won the Orwell Prize for Journalism.
History, at human scale
Her books move between the Russia she knew as a correspondent and the England of earlier centuries. The novels follow people negotiating love, loyalty and ambition while the world around them changes.
In Midnight in St Petersburg, a family of violin makers faces the Russian Revolution. Researching the novel led Vanora to make her own violin — a connection between her writing and her longstanding love of music.
The White Russian moves to the Russian émigré community in 1930s Paris. Her Tudor and medieval novels include Portrait of an Unknown Woman, Figures in Silk, Blood Royal and The People’s Queen.
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