Daria Santini is an independent scholar and writer. Her books include The Exiles: Actors, Artists and Writers Who Fled the Nazis for London, and the newly published A Woman Named Edith. Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent - The Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart
ABOUT DARIA
Daria Santini was born and educated in Rome and studied in Italy and Germany. In 1992 she moved to London, where she still lives, dividing her time between the UK and Puglia, Southern Italy.
She is a writer of biography and cultural history, with a background in modern German literature, a subject she taught at the University of Oxford – at St. Hilda's and Magdalen Colleges – for fifteen years until 2010. Between 2000 and 2002, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. Her academic work has focused mainly on the literary reception of Classical mythology, modern German drama, opera libretti, and literature and the visual arts. Her publications include books on the Greek plays of the dramatist and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann and on the literature of the Third Reich and of the German-speaking writers in exile.
Her interest in the social, political, and cross-cultural dimensions of exile has also shaped her more recent books, The Exiles: Actors, Artists and Writers Who Fled the Nazis for London and A Woman Named Edith: Émigré, Photographer and Secret Agent – the Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart. Both grew out of a deep sense of history and place, and an enduring interest in the ways different cultures overlap, influence, and reshape one another.
IN THE PRESS
My Books
"The Exiles is a timely reminder of the major impact such a migration can provide: an impeccably
researched yet eminently readable book packed with fascinating and often intimate portraits of
once-celebrated figures whose contribution to the artistic life of Britain and beyond deserves to
be better remembered"
DANIEL SNOWMAN,
The Jewish Chronicle
