Robert Dessaix

Renowned writer and broadcaster Robert Dessaix delivers this annual lecture on the craft of biography, autobiography and memoir. In a world that thrives on the lives of Lady Gaga, Madonna and the latest winner of Masterchef, Robert explores ways of writing about ordinary lives and why we want to read ... (more)about them. Robert Dessaix is a writer, translator, broadcaster and occasional essayist. His best-known books, all translated into several European languages, are his autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace, the novels Night Letters and Corfu, a collection of essays and short stories (and so forth) and, most recently, the travel memoirs Twilight of Love, which grew out of his fascination with Turgenev and Russian literature, and Arabesques, an exploration of themes connected with the life of the French writer André Gide. In 2009 he published On Humbug, an extended essay on the uses and abuses of various kinds of untruth. A full-time writer since 1995, Robert Dessaix lives in Hobart, Tasmania

Featuring meditations and conversations with fellow travellers on diverse subjects as illicit passions, why we travel and growing old Arabesques is Robert Dessaix and travel memoir at their finest.