Telling Lives

'What we now want from a biography, or autobiography, is the very thing that Virginia Woolf said that we have no right to want: art. Not only art, obviously, but art nevertheless. And we love the illumination of dark corners of the soul, having quite a few of our own, if we're honest with ourselves.' Robert Dessaix The Seymour Biography Lecture was presented annually at the Australian National University and the National Library of Australia from 2005 to 2023, by eminent biographers, autobiograp