hwacall.blogg.se - The birth of venus dunant

She is also a creative writing fellow at Oxford Brookes University. She teaches creative writing at The Faber Academy in London and biennially at Washington University in St. She was a founding vice patron of the Orange Prize for women's fiction, sits on the editorial board of the Royal Academy magazine, and reviews for the Times, Guardian, and Independent on Sunday.

Sarah Dunant is a writer, broadcaster and critic.

Awards-Silver Dagger Award for Crime Fiction.

Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra's married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola's reactionary followers. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control.

But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra's parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities. Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family's Florentine palazzo.