Best-selling historical novelist Sarah Dunant offers some insights from a battle field of a career which has taken her from academic history, through two decades of BBC journalism, television and radio, literary criticism and thriller writing back to her first and greatest love—the past. Over the last fifteen years she has been using fiction shot through with new historical and art research to explore and bring alive the cultural revolution that was the Italian renaissance. A world soaked with religion, artistic brilliance, bloodthirsty politics and a powerful and corrupt church all deeply interwoven. There have been moments when it has been hard to know if she is studying the past or the present.

Come prepared to join in a conversation about how the boundaries within academic study break down as soon as they mulch into life and to celebrate the wonders, challenges (and occasional horrors) of a modern portfolio existence.

Sarah is Writer-in-Residence in UBC’s Creative Writing department and is a notable speaker at the Vancouver Writers Fest. Make sure to come out and see her at the following talk:

“Getting Under Their Skins” - Sunday, October 25 at 10:30 a.m.