From her website:
Anne Sebba Historian
Welcome to 2025! Worries about Covid may have receded but war, brutality and uncertainty are still with us four years on. So it has seemed fitting that I have been researching a new book about a grim subject for grim times… the extraordinary story of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. It’s about female solidarity and the redemptive power of music as well as survival against the odds and will be published in March 2025 in the UK to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. there are various translations planned in the course of 2025 and 2026! watch this space.
2023 was the 70th anniversary of the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, electrocuted for for Conspiracy to Commit Espionage without any evidence against her, and I was very honoured that my biography of Ethel was published in France. Having spent years thinking about one woman in one prison, I am now contemplating the lives of hundreds of women in one of the most appalling prisons in history. Living in isolation during Covid helped me a little in my understanding of the tragedy which befell Ethel. But entering imaginatively into the lives of women in Auschwitz is a far harder task and listening to their testimonies (thankfully there are hundreds of these online) does keep me awake at night. I never forget that as the great giant of biography Richard Holmes wrote, self identification with one’s subject is the first crime of the biographer, but it still is a kind of duty to try and help the women who survived as well as those who did not bear witness to what they saw. I tried to tell the story of an era through the story of a woman, Ethel Rosenberg, I shall try and do the same with the current book.
Incidentally Ethel has a variety of titles – An American Tragedy in the US Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy in the UK and for the paperback it is called The Short life and Great betrayal of an American wife and mother.
My previous book was published on July 14th 2016 – Bastille Day – Les Parisiennes, about women in Paris from 1939-49, in US, UK, France, Czech Republic, China and other countries. There are stories in it about resisters, collaborators, spies, writers and actresses, couturiers and jewellery designers, housewives, concierges and prostitutes. It won a prize and is being turned into a multi-part screenplay for TV (watch this space!) I have always been fascinated by French History and the reverberations from this period are still being felt in the country today. Although I loved writing the story of Wallis Simpson (and she even has a cameo role in this book) I wanted to write a book of history this time and move away from biography for a change.
For two years of my research I was chair of the Management Committee of Britain’s Society of Authors, a great honour and privilege in difficult and challenging times for authors as the Society fights for Authors’ rights in a number of areas and is desperately needed. I am now on the SOA Council. But when I am not busy reading or reviewing someone else’s book, I will be concentrating on talking about my books, including Les Parisiennes. As any writer will tell you, you never quite leave your old books behind. New material keeps coming your way and you are constantly re thinking your work!
In 2011, I published That Woman: a life of Wallis Simpson Duchess of Windsor in the UK alongside a C4 television documentary ba
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