Bidisha

BIDISHA was born in 1978 and educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics. She started writing for i-D, Dazed+Confused, and NME at the age of 15. At 16 she wrote a regular column for The Big Issue and signed her first book deal with HarperCollins, who published her first novel, SEAHORSES, in 1997 when she was 18. Bidisha went on to write a weekly column for The Independent and contribute to The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday, the Evening Standard and The List. She was also a contributing editor for feminist magazine Sibyl and style magazine 2nd Generation. From January 2000 to September 2002 she was an arts critic and broadsheet reviewer for BBC London and has since appeared on numerous television and radio programmes commenting on the arts and social issues. Duckworth published her second novel, TOO FAST TO LIVE, in spring 2000 when she was 21. In 2003 and 2004 Bidisha was a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory, Journalism and Ethics at The London College.

VENETIAN MASTERS: Under the Skin of the City of Love

Very few people, even other Italians, get to experience the real Venice. The city which has been mythologised in history, art, literature and music for centuries uses this very myth quite deliberately to cloak its real nature, while memoirs and stories set there tend to stress only clichés. In the long, humid summers of 2004 and 2005 Bidisha set out to explore the truth of the City of Love. She was guided through its intricate social conventions by the chic family of a friend, a family as quirky and regal as anything Henry James could invent. Yet beneath their worldliness and sophistication lurked the deep hypocrisies of Venetian life. Bidisha came to realise that it was a city in which elegance and ugliness coexist, seemingly unaware of each other. While settling in to the easygoing rhythm of ‘the Italian way’, she also glimpsed a coldness, savagery and moral darkness that lay close beneath the sophistication of this famously stylish place; a city in which exquisite medieval art and a strong family ethos exist hand in hand; in which she was simultaneously charmed by the sanguine temperaments and repelled by the constant narrow-mindedness. Along the way she almost (but not quite) fell in love with a charming young man called Emanuele…

VENETIAN MASTERS is a barbed portrait of a wacky family, and an affectionate rendering of a city’s exquisite peculiarities.

‘An extraordinary talent.’ The Spectator

‘Excellent: a meditation on that most haunting and evocative of places, La Serenissima’ The Independent

Sales

Summersdale UK

Ripol Russia

Material: UK edition.