Vanora
Bennett

Author & journalist

Stories of lives caught in history.
From Russia to Tudor England, through fiction and reporting.

Vanora Bennett

The Orwell Prize
for Journalism

2004 WinnerThe Times

View the official winner profile

Reporting a world in upheaval

Vanora Bennett won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2004. The Orwell Foundation’s winner profile recognises her as a foreign correspondent for The Times and recounts the international reporting that shaped her writing.

Her career began at Reuters after university. An assignment in Paris led her to Cambodia and its peace negotiations; later, she reported on the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique. She arrived in the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse and spent the early 1990s covering the Caucasus and the events leading to war in Chechnya.

Alongside The Times, her journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Prospect, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian’s Saturday magazine.

Adapted from Vanora Bennett’s profile at the Orwell Foundation.

Fiction shaped by history

All books
Vanora Bennett holding a violin, beside The White Russian

A life of words
and music

Reporting took Vanora from Cambodia and southern Africa to Russia and the Caucasus. Her novels brought her to other times and other lives — and, while writing about violin makers, to making a violin of her own.

Meet Vanora

Beyond the novels

More journalism