Dorothy Dunnett
| Dorothy Dunnett | |
|---|---|
| Born | Dorothy Halliday 25 August 1923 Dunfermline, Scotland |
| Died | 9 November 2001 (aged 78) Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | Scottish-British |
| Period | 1961–2000 |
| Genre | historical fiction, mystery |
| Notable works | Lymond Chronicles, House of Niccolò, Johnson Johnson series, King Hereafter |
| Notable awards | OBE |
| Spouse | Sir Alastair Dunnett |
Dorothy Dunnett OBE (née Halliday, 25 August 1923 – 9 November 2001) was a Scottish historical novelist. She is best known for her six-part series about Francis Crawford of Lymond, The Lymond Chronicles, which she followed with the eight-part prequel The House of Niccolò. She also wrote a novel about the historical Macbeth called King Hereafter (1982), and a series of mystery novels centred on Johnson Johnson, a portrait painter/spy.
Dunnett was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls in Edinburgh. She started her career as a press officer in the civil service, where she met her husband.
A leading light in the Scottish arts world and a renaissance woman, she was a professional portrait painter and exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy on many occasions. She had portraits commissioned by a number of prominent public figures in Scotland. She had a keen interest in opera, was a trustee of the National Library of Scotland, a board member of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, a trustee of the Scottish National War Memorial, and a non-executive director of Scottish Television. In 1992 she was awarded an OBE for her services to literature. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement, Alexander Fiske-Harrison reviewed her final novel in 2000, Gemini, and through that her entire oeuvre of historical fiction: "Although Dunnett’s writing style is not the neutral prose of genre fiction and it can be opaque and hard to read, especially in the early works, at times, this works with the almost melodramatic content to produce a powerful, operatic mixture... It is neither as a literary novelist nor as a historian, but as a writer of historical fiction that Dorothy Dunnett deserves recognition... The publication of Gemini completes an ambitious literary circle."
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