Anne Sebba is an award-winning British biographer, writer, lecturer and journalist. She is the author of nine non-fiction books for adults, two biographies for children and several introductions to reprinted classics.
Life
Anne Sebba was born in London in 1951. She read history at King's College London and after a brief spell at the BBCWorld Service in Bush House joined Reuters as a graduate trainee, working in London and Rome, from 1972 to 1978. She wrote her first book while living in New York City and now lives in London. Her discovery of an unpublished series of letters from Wallis Simpson to her second husband Ernest Simpson, shortly before her eventual marriage to the ex-King, Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, formed the basis of a Channel 4 film, The Secret Letters, first shown on UK television in August 2011, and also a biography of Simpson, That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson Duchess of Windsor. The letters have led to a reappraisal of the abdication crisis. Sebba’s books have been translated into several languages including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Czech and Chinese. Since working as a correspondent for Reuters, Sebba has written for The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, Times Higher Education Supplement and The Independent. She has been cited as an authority on biography. In 2009, Sebba wrote and presented The Daffodil Maiden on BBC Radio 3. It was the story of the pianist Harriet Cohen, who inspired the composer Arnold Bax when she wore a dress adorned with a single daffodil and became his mistress for the next 40 years. In 2010, she wrote and presented the documentary Who was Joyce Hatto? for BBC Radio 4. In September 2009, Sebba joined the management committee of the Society of Authors. She was chair of the committee between 2012 and 2014 and is now a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. She is a longstanding member of English PEN and after several years on the Writers in Prison Committee served twice on the PEN management committee. She went to Turkey twice as an official observer for PEN for the trial of journalist Asiye Guzel Zeybeck She has served on the judging panel of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize. and has twice been a judge for the Biographers' Club awards. In 2012, Sebba spoke at the Beijing and Shanghai Literary Festivals and the Sydney Writers' Festival. Anne is a Trustee of the and a Senior Research Fellow of the
Critical reception
Jennie Churchill: Winston's American Mother was reviewed, inter alia, in The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, and The Scotsman, That Woman was described in The New York Times Sunday Book Review as a "devourable feast of highly spiced history…which acquires the propulsive energy of a thriller as it advances through Wallis's life". and in The Washington Times as "a delicious new biography… meticulously researched". In 2016, Sebba published Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s, published in the United States as Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died under the Nazi Occupation. This was described as "fascinating and beautifully written" by The Spectator and was the joint winner of the Franco-British society’s book prize for 2016. Les Parisiennes has been translated into Chinese, Czech and French. In 2018, a reviewer in Le Figaro Magazine coined the phrase "La Méthode Sebba" to describe the author’s method of linking interviews with living people and archive material to create a tableau of women during the dark years.
