Daisy Dunn
English writer and classicist
Daisy Florence Dunn is an English author and classicist who is known for making her specialty accessible to the public through radio and other media avenues.
Early life and education
Daisy Dunn was born in London and attended Ibstock Place School in Southwest London and The Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton on an academic scholarship. She graduated in classics from St Hilda's College, Oxford in 2009, 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. She was awarded a PhD 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 £20,000 Notting Hill Editions Prize for the essay "An Unlikely Friendship".
Writing
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' expletives resulted in a series of letters in The Times Literary Supplement and an article in The Times. In a 2016 article in The Guardian Simon Schama included Dunn in his list of leading female historians.
Dunn's 2019 dual biography of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, In the Shadow of 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.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as english writer and classicist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24373878. VIAF identifies the subject as 94145003307061301707. The Library of Congress control number is n2015071548. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2015, 2016 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Daisy Dunn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.