Vanora bennett biography template

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.

Vanora bennett biography template

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 t