Sarah Dunant Books in Order

If you want Renaissance Italy and art: The Birth of Venus → In the Company of the Courtesan → Sacred Hearts
If you are curious about the Borgias: Blood & Beauty → In the Name of the Family
If you prefer contemporary psychological suspense: Snow Storms In A Hot Climate → Transgressions → Mapping the Edge
If you enjoy private investigator crime series: Birth Marks → Fatlands → Under My Skin
If you want her latest Renaissance portrait: The Marchesa

Sarah Dunant grew up in postwar London, the daughter of a Welsh airline steward who became a manager at British Airways and a French mother who had been raised in Bangalore. Books, travel and lively argument were part of everyday life, and history was the subject that kept catching her imagination.

She went to Godolphin and Latymer, a girls grammar school in west London, then read history at Newnham College, Cambridge. At Cambridge she split her time between the library and student theatre, acting with comedy and drama groups and discovering how much she liked working with stories in front of an audience.

After graduation she tried acting for real, earning an Equity card and taking small parts on stage and television. Restless and curious, she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English by day and worked as a nightclub hostess at night, then travelled home overland through Southeast Asia, a journey that would later find its way into her fiction.

Back in Britain she joined BBC Radio 4 as a producer on the arts programme Kaleidoscope. That job launched a long broadcast career which has included presenting Radio 4s Womans Hour, fronting the late night arts show The Late Show on BBC2 and hosting the cultural discussion programme Night Waves on BBC Radio 3. Alongside the broadcasting she reviewed books and culture for major newspapers and began to write fiction.

Her first novels were political thrillers written with her friend Peter Busby under the joint pseudonym Peter Dunant, followed by her solo debut Snow Storms In A Hot Climate, a psychological thriller about the early cocaine trade in Colombia. In the 1990s she created Hannah Wolfe, a London private investigator whose cases in Birth Marks, Fatlands and Under My Skin explore subjects such as surrogacy, animal rights and cosmetic surgery from an unapologetically feminist angle.

She pushed psychological suspense further in stand alone novels like Transgressions and Mapping the Edge, where women dealing with stalkers, missing friends or the pressures of motherhood find ways to resist being turned into victims. Readers have gravitated to the tight plotting, the uneasy mix of fear and desire and the sense that everyday domestic spaces can harbour real danger.

A visit to Florence around the year 2000 sent her back to the history she had studied at university. Immersed in archives and art, she turned fully to historical fiction, beginning with The Birth of Venus, followed by In the Company of the Courtesan and Sacred Hearts. Later came the Borgia novels Blood & Beauty and In the Name of the Family, and most recently The Marchesa, which reimagines the life of Isabella dEste through her extraordinary surviving letters.

In these Renaissance books she is known for weaving rigorous research into vivid, accessible stories about womens lives inside convents, palaces and papal courts. Themes of power, sex, faith and the body run through them, and she often draws on her own experiences from childbirth to long hours in archives to make historical women feel physically present on the page.

Alongside the novels she has edited essay collections on political correctness in The War of the Words and on modern anxiety in The Age of Anxiety with historian Roy Porter, and she has taught on university courses in both creative writing and Renaissance studies. She is also an accredited lecturer who speaks widely on Italian history and art.

Today she divides her time between London and Florence with her family. She has two grown daughters, continues to write fiction and essays, and still appears regularly on radio, using storytelling and conversation to connect contemporary debates with the complicated past that fascinates her.