Female spies – fact or fiction? Ava Glass and Daria Santini speak to the spy novelist Peter Hanington.
Join the UK queen of spy fiction and former spy insider Ava Glass, and Oxford University lecturer, independent scholar and biographer Daria Santini, as they discuss the incredible spy stories they’ve uncovered in their work. Ava and Daria will swap tales of secret worlds and hidden influence, the spies who shaped history and compare the real-life agents with the spies of fiction who fill our bookshelves as they discuss their latest books, The Hiding Season by Ava Glass and A Woman Named Edith by Daria Santini.
Having previously worked with MI5 and signed the official secrets act, Ava Glass reveals the hidden world of female espionage in compelling and realistic spy fiction that shatters the James Bond stereotype by putting women centre stage. Having sold over 2million copies of her books, Ava Glass’s latest spy novel The Hiding Season explores the damage that spies do to those who accidentally cross their path and follows an ordinary woman’s life as it implodes after she witnesses a spy murder one of America’s most powerful senators.
Daria Santini has written a major new biography of Edith Tudor Hart, the photographer and Soviet agent who recruited Kim Philby. A Jewish-Austrian exile in 1930s London Edith Tudor Hart was a talented professional photographer, anti-fascist activist and Soviet secret agent. Daria Santini traces Tudor Hart’s life from her early years in the socialist intellectual circles of Vienna through her training at the Bauhaus to her work as a Soviet agent in Britain and her role in the Cambridge Spies network, including recruiting Kim Philby.
Ava Glass and Daria Santini speak to the spy novelist Peter Hanington and will sign copies of their books at the end of the talk.
