Anne Sebba
Anne Sebba is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a biographer, lecturer, journalist, former Reuters foreign correspondent and author of eleven books for adults.
She read History at King’s College London and her first job was at the BBC World Services in the Arabic Department. She has written many critically acclaimed books of non-fiction, mostly about iconic women who enjoyed using power and influence in different ways. Her latest book is Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy (2021 publication and film rights sold to Miramax). Before that, she wrote about Paris from 1939-49 through women’s eyes, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died published in 2016, ‘a standout social history,’ a winner of the Franco-British Society prize. Film rights have been sold, with a multi-episode TV drama planned. Her biography, That Woman: the Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, quickly became a bestseller on publication in Britain in August 2011 as well as in Australia and in the US.
Anne has three children and six grandchildren, is a former Chair of Britain’s 10,000 strong Society of Authors, now on the SOA Council, and former President of Arts Richmond. She is a Trustee of the National Archives Trust and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research.
Anne Sebba is sponsored by
The story of Ethel Rosenberg – the short life and great betrayal of a young American wife and mother
In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother.
Seventy years after her trial, this is the first time Ethel’s story has been told with the full use of the dramatic and tragic prison letters she exchanged with her husband, her lawyer, and her psychotherapist over a three-year period, two of them in solitary confinement. Hers is the resonant story of what happens when a government motivated by fear tramples on the rights of its citizens.