Daisy Florence Dunn is an author, classicist, and critic.
Biography
Daisy Dunn was born in London and attended Ibstock Place School and The Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton, Middlesex. She read Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and won a scholarship to study for an MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, London, specialising in Titian, Venice and Renaissance Europe. In 2013, she was awarded a PhD in Classics and Art History from University College London with a thesis exploring ekphrasis in Greek and Latin poetry and sixteenth-century Italian painting. She was long-listed in 2015 for the international Notting Hill Editions Prize for the essay "An Unlikely Friendship". In 2016 she published her first two books, a biography of the Latin love poet Catullus and a new translation of his poems. The biography, entitled Catullus' Bedspread, received endorsements from Boris Johnson, Robert Harris and Tom Holland and was described as a 'superb portrait' in The Sunday Times. Dunn's translation of one of Catullus' expletive words resulted in a series of letters in The Times Literary Supplement and an article in The Times. In a 2016 article in The GuardianSimon Schama included Daisy Dunn in his list of leading female historians. Dunn's 2019 dual biography of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, In the Shadow Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, published as The Shadow of Vesuvius in the US, was a New York Times Editor's Choice, a Waterstones Best History Book of 2019, and a Book of the Year in several publications. Dunn was interviewed ahead of its release by The Sunday Times and by Dan Snow for his podcast HistoryHit. Also in 2019, Dunn published an anthology of ancient stories in English translation, Of Gods and Men: 100 Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome, for which she was interviewed by Paul Ross on TalkRadio and invited to speak at the British Library. A month later, she released Homer, part of a new 'expert' series of Ladybird books. Dunn is a regular critic and commentator. She reviews books for the Evening Standard and Literary Review, art and radio for The Spectator, and writes columns for The Daily Telegraph and Standpoint Magazine. She has contributed to the BBC World Service, TalkRadio, and BBC 2, for which she participated in the 2016 Christmas University Challenge for notable alumni, with her team winning the series. In 2018 and 2019 she presented two short films on Latin phrases and Ancient Wisdom for BBC Ideas. In 2020, Dunn was awarded the Classical Association Prize, which recognises efforts to bring the classics to public attention.
Works
Dunn is the author of:
Catullus' Bedspread: The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet
