Living Lives: A Biographer’s Journey

Living Lives: A Biographer’s Journey  by Anne Chambers

Anne Chambers has lived her life through the lives of others. Over the past 40 years she has written award-winning biographies of pirates, princes, patriots, prima donnas, playboy planter emancipators and forgotten survivors of conquest. As one reviewer noted of the biographer, novelist and screenplay writer:

‘Anne Chambers is one of the rare exceptions. She has that quality of seeing, feeling and understanding the period she writes about as if she were a contemporary.’

 As she readily admits, Chambers has tended to live her own ‘more mundane life’ through the more exciting lives of her subjects. Her best-selling biographies have rescued and reinstated the lives of some remarkable men and women.

In Living Lives we are introduced to the art and methodology of writing biography as Anne brings the reader along on her many and diverse voyages of discovery through epochs, countries and cultures.

‘In this age of narcissistic captivation with the individual self it comes as somewhat of a relief that through the art of biography one can shine a light on and learn about the life of someone else; someone who made a genuine contribution to their time on this earth.’

– Anne Chambers

Anne Chambers is a biographer, novelist and screenplay writer, whose books include the bestselling Grace O’Malley: The Biography of Ireland’s Pirate Queen, 1530–1603; Eleanor Countess of Desmond, 1545–1638; Lord Mayo, 1565–1629; La Sheridan: Adorable Diva, 1889–1958; Ranji: Maharajah of Connemara; From Rake to Radical: Lord Sligo – An Irish Abolitionist, 1788–1845; and T.K. Whitaker: Irishman of the Twentieth Century. Her books have been the subject of national and international TV and radio documentaries.

Cover images of Grace O’Malley and Eleanor Countess of Desmond reproduced with the kind permission of Gill Books.