Photo: Nicola Levinsky
Ingrid Soren's book Meeting Dante (recently reviewed by Malcolm Guite and Paul Stubbs) is the result of a passion to bring him to a wider general readership. It has been described as a dazzling tour de force on love, human and divine, and on one of the oldest stories in the world: betrayal. This original book is scholarly without being academic, is beautifully described and a compulsive read.
She was supported in her Dante work by Cambridge University’s Professor of Italian Literature, Robin Kirkpatrick, who translated The Divine Comedy for Penguin Classics. Ingrid lectured on Dante and Eliot to the Cambridge International Summer School in 2005, and delivered a paper on Dante and his cat to an International Symposium on Dante and Eliot in Florence 2008.
Ingrid was the keynote speaker at the T.S.Eliot Society Festival at Little Gidding in 2008, alongside Sean o’Brien and Peter Stanford, and was invited back in 2010 to give a talk on Eliot and Zen. Ingrid’s The Zen of Horseriding was published by Time Warner in 2001 and translated into Dutch and German. Her interest in zen is ongoing. In 2009 she was engaged as Principal Consultant in Contemporary Readings of Dante to the ‘Dante Experience’ run by the Italian Department at Cambridge.
Ingrid’s work-in-progress, Dante’s Journey to the Stars, is a book that will bring Dante to ‘everyman’ - reaching a wider and younger readership than ever before. It will be the perfect introduction to Dante for anyone with imagination from the age of ten upwards. Ingrid’s special interests are film, music and dance, and she has recently written articles on the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum for 'Canvas' magazine.
Under her real name Rosamond Richardson she has written several books about the countryside, and now writes for Country Life on wild flowers and birds. In the past she presented a number of programmes for BBC2 television, including Discovering Hedgerows and published over thirty non-fiction books, a versatile range including an interview-based book on Stalin's Family, The Long Shadow (Little, Brown, 1993), which gave her a defining presence beside Simon Sebag-Montefiore in the BBC2 documentary Stalin: Inside the Terror, subsequently shown on the History and Discovery channels. Her books have sold in USA, Canada, Australia and South Africa, and foreign editions include Germany, Holland, Spain, France, Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Poland and Finland.
CONTACTS
email Ingrid at ingrid.ingridsoren@gmail.com
Literary agent: Bill Hamilton at A.M.Heath bill.hamilton@amheath.com