Anne Sebba

Anne Sebba is the author of eleven books including the best-selling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson based on her discovery of 15 unpublished letters locked away in an attic trunk. After that she wrote the award-winning Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940’s about a wide variety of women and how they behaved in wartime Paris published in the US, UK, China, France and the Czech Republic and optioned for a multi series TV programme. Her most recent book is Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy which has been optioned for a film by Miramax. She has also written biographies of Jennie Churchill, Mother Teresa, Laura Ashley among others.

Anne gives regular talks about William Bankes (Based on the research for her book The Exiled Collector) covering his friendship with Byron from Cambridge onwards. At the end of Bankes’ Grand Tour he spent time with Byron then living in disgrace in Venice. So when Bankes himself escaped into his final exile he copied Byron and went to Venice. It is almost a parallel story with great insight into the ethos of the day and how unorthodox living was so shocking. Both Bankes and Byron proposed to the same woman Annabella Milbanke. Bankes was refused and she married Byron. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research.

Anne makes regular television appearances and has presented programmes for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 including two about the pianists, Harriet Cohen and Joyce Hatto and has just finished a two year stint as head of Britain’s 10,000 strong Society of Authors. She is a former foreign correspondent as she began her working life at Reuters news agency, the first woman accepted on their graduate trainee scheme. She has also worked for the BBC world services in their Arabic department, although she does not speak a word of Arabic. But she speaks French, German and Russian, which may have helped.

She is a broadcaster and journalist as well as a lecturer for various institutions and schools in the UK and US such as the British Library, Royal Oak, English Speaking Union and the National Trust.