Daria Santini

Biography

Daria Santini was born in Rome and educated in Italy and Germany. Her most recent books – The Exiles. Actors, Artists and Writers Who Fled the Nazis for London (Bloomsbury 2019) and A Woman Named Edith. Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent: the Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart (Yale University Press 2026) – move beyond her earlier academic work to explore biography and cultural history in a wider, more personal register.

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She holds a PhD in German Literature from the University of Pisa, was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Munich, and taught German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford (St. Hilda’s and Magdalen Colleges) for fifteen years until 2010. She now lives between London and Puglia, Southern Italy, and works as an independent scholar and writer.

Daria’s work defies easy categorisation. A literary scholar by training, she has developed a deep passion for biography and cultural history, and her writing is marked by meticulous research, stylistic clarity and a sure narrative instinct.

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Books

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Hunter Class - Alan Bardos
Hunter Class - Alan Bardos

Articles

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Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent: An Extraordinary Life

Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent: An Extraordinary Life

Who was Edith Tudor-Hart? For a long time, and especially after the revelation of her crucial role in the creation of modern Britain's most notorious spy ring – the Cambridge Five – she existed more as a cipher than as a real person. I first encountered her name well over a decade ago. At the ...

Interviews

An Interview with Daria Santini

An Interview with Daria Santini

What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? As a student of German literature, I wrote my PhD thesis on the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, whose life and work spanned the decades from the 1860s to the 1940s. It was a period dense with momentous transformations and cataclysmic ...