Vanora Bennett biography

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

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