Frances Stonor Saunders, a British writer, broadcaster, and documentary filmmaker, died August 31, the Guardian reported. She was 60. Her 1999 book Who Paid the Piper?, an exposé of CIA-funded cultural espionage during the Cold War, "single-handedly established a new branch of sub-history," author Ian McEwan said.
Translated into 17 languages, the book established Saunders, then in her early 30s, as "one of the most exciting nonfiction writers of her generation," the Guardian wrote. "Through trawling declassified documents and countless interviews, Frances revealed how the CIA, under the guise of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was behind thousands of books, magazines, exhibitions and concerts. She showed that many of the intellectual elite of the time--including George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Jackson Pollock--had, knowingly or otherwise, become tools of the American secret service."
Saunders began her career in television, and it was her work on a 1995 Channel 4 documentary series about the connection between abstract expressionism and the CIA that set her on the trail toward her first book.
Who Paid the Piper? won the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone book prize and was followed by Hawkwood (2004), a history of a 14th-century mercenary, and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (2010), the story of Anglo-Irish aristocrat Violet Gibson, who attempted to assassinate the Italian dictator in 1926.
The Suitcase, Saunders's final book, which grew from a series of essays for the London Review of Books, "was her most personal, tracing her father's journey as a boy escaping Romania to his descent into Alzheimer's in his 50s," the Guardian noted." It won the PEN Ackerley prize for memoir in 2022.
Lisa Allardice, who worked with Saunders when the latter was arts editor of the New Statesman in the early 2000s, wrote in the Guardian: "Frances was made a member of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.... An intellectual in a dumbed-down world, she was in some ways out of her time. She refused to submit to the tyranny of digital culture and loathed the Smartphone she was given during her illness.
"She was thrilled to know that Who Paid the Piper? is being reissued next month. A new foreword calls it a 'masterpiece of investigative history.' Nearly 30 years after it was first published, the book's warnings about the weaponization of culture for political ends are all too timely."