Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of 2025!

Vanora Bennett Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Vanora Bennett

Vanora Bennett

Vanora Bennett Biography

Vanora Bennett became a journalist almost by accident. Having learned Russian and been hired after university by Reuters, she was catapulted out of the classical-music life of her family and straight into the adrenaline-charged realm of conflict reporting. While on a trainee assignment in Paris, she fell in with the Cambodian émigré community and ended up reporting in Cambodia herself, a decade after the Khmer Rouge regime ended, as well as covering Cambodian peace talks in places as far apart as Indonesia and Paris. That led to a similar job in Africa, commuting between Angola and Mozambique and writing about death, destruction, diamonds and disease, and later to a posting in a country that stopped being the Soviet Union three months after she arrived. She spent much of the early 1990s in smoky taxis in the Caucasus mountains, covering a series of small post-Soviet conflicts that built up to the war in Chechnya.

Her fascination with the cultural and religious differences between Russians and the many peoples once ruled by Moscow grew into a book on the Chechen war (Crying Wolf: The Return of War to Chechnya). A second, more light-hearted book followed, about post-Soviet Russia's illegal caviar trade. This book was The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar.

She now leads a more sedate life in North London with her husband and two small sons. Since 2006, she has written four novels set in the English past. Midnight in St Petersburg, set in Russia, is the fifth. It's about a musical family of violin-makers caught up in the 1917 Revolution, which means it combines a lot of the strands of her own past experience that until now she had thought were just plain incompatible: music, Russia, and pity for the ordinary people caught up in big, uncontrollable conflicts. Writing it was also the chance she had been looking for to do some very Stanislevsky-esque research – and make a violin of her own.

Vanora Bennett's website

This bio was last updated on 01/18/2014. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Interview

Vanora Bennett talks about the inspiration for her first novel, Portrait of an Unknown Woman which is set against the turmoil, intrigue and, tragedy of Henry VIII's court.

What was the inspiration for Portrait of an Unknown Woman?

The first glimmering of the idea for this book came from an exhibition of Holbein drawings at the National Portrait Gallery about 10 years ago.

I was fascinated both by his sheer skill and by the faces of the new Tudor aristocracy he was drawing, enriched by the very recent dissolution of the monasteries and getting fat on the spoils they'd looted. I was living in Boris Yeltsin's New Russia at the time, and the faces Holbein was drawing struck me as having a lot in common with the tough, aggressive, on-the-make faces of the successful new capitalists I saw all around me in Moscow every day.

So I bought the exhibition catalogue and read it from cover to cover in the plane back to Moscow. And in it I found a passing reference to an "ingenious" theory about two versions of Holbein's portrait of Thomas More's family. (The second version of the picture has an extra character in it). The theory had been dreamed up by a retired jeweller called Jack Leslau to explain who this extra character was and why he suddenly appeared in the second version of the group portrait. Leslau believed that the man was John Clement, the More children's tutor, who had married...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Books by this Author

Books by Vanora Bennett at BookBrowse
Midnight in St. Petersburg jacket The Queen's Lover jacket Figures in Silk jacket Portrait of an Unknown Woman jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Vanora Bennett but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Helen Castor

    Helen Castor

    Helen Castor is a historian of medieval England and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her first book, Blood and Roses, was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Queen's Lover

    Try:
    Joan of Arc
    by Helen Castor

  • Tracy Chevalier

    Tracy Chevalier

    Tracy Chevalier was born in Washington, DC but has lived in England all her adult life. She now has dual citizenship. She has a BA in English from Oberlin College, Ohio and an MA in creative writing from the University of ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Portrait of an Unknown Woman

    Try:
    Girl With A Pearl Earring
    by Tracy Chevalier

We recommend 21 similar authors


Non-members can see 2 results. Become a member
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    From the bestselling author of I Was Anastasia comes a historical mystery inspired by 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard, who investigates a shocking murder.
  • Book Jacket
    The Wager
    by David Grann
    From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a gripping story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
  • Book Jacket
    The Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Three Days in June
    by Anne Tyler

    A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

  • Book Jacket

    Beast of the North Woods
    by Annelise Ryan

    When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.

  • Book Jacket

    Harlem Rhapsody
    by Victoria Christopher Murray

    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

Who Said...

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

D to T N

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.