Tessa Dunlop Books in Order

Tessa Dunlop is a Scottish historian, writer, and broadcaster whose work returns again and again to people left out of the tidier versions of history. Born in Rannoch, Perthshire, she was raised and educated in Perthshire before heading south for university. Her books and broadcasts tend to start with a big historical subject, then narrow the focus to the people who lived through it.

She attended Pitlochry High School and Strathallan School, then read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. While at Oxford, she won the Gertrude Easton Prize for History. The combination of research, curiosity, and a willingness to talk to people at length would shape much of her later work.

Romania changed the direction of her life. At eighteen, before beginning at Oxford, Dunlop travelled to post-communist Romania to volunteer in an orphanage, hoping the experience would strengthen a future university application. She stayed far longer than expected, returned to teach English, and built close connections with people whose lives opened up a country that many British readers knew only through headlines.

That experience became a lasting thread in her work.

After university, Dunlop began in radio at LBC and BBC London. She later moved into television, presenting history programmes for the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery Channel Europe, UKTV History, and the History Channel. Her work on the regional programme Inside Out West earned her a Royal Television Society award in 2005, and she became familiar to many viewers through BBC Two's Coast.

Broadcasting taught her how much history can come alive when a person is allowed to tell a story in their own way.

Her first book, To Romania with Love, is a memoir about returning to Romania and the relationships that grew from her first youthful visit. It is personal, funny in places, and alert to the awkwardness of crossing cultures. The book also shows the interest in ordinary lives that would become central to her later nonfiction.

In The Bletchley Girls, Dunlop draws on conversations with fifteen women who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Rather than treating them as background figures in a familiar codebreaking story, she follows their recruitment, secret work, friendships, romances, and long postwar silences. The Century Girls uses a similar people-first approach, telling a hundred years of British change through the memories of six women who had lived it.

Her royal history, Elizabeth & Philip, looks at the early courtship and marriage of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, setting their private relationship against the pressures of postwar Britain and monarchy. Across these books, Dunlop is interested in women’s lives, memory, war, national identity, and the gap between public history and what people remember at home.

She completed a doctorate at Sheffield Hallam University in 2020, focused on British public and political representations of Romania during the First World War. Dunlop lives in London with her husband and their two daughters, and continues to work across books, radio, television, and history projects.