ANU/THE CANBERRA TIMES MEET THE AUTHOR

Julia Baird will be in conversation with Alex Sloan on Julia's acclaimed biography Victoria The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Changed the World, a fascinating, provocative and authoritative biography from one of Australia's most admired and respected journalists and commentators.

Julia Baird, building upon new archival research from the Royal Archives at Windsor, examines what it was it like to reign over the world's greatest empire as queen, but in an age when women were supposed to be submissive, supportive and subservient. Victoria: The Queen is a stunning new portrait of the "real" Victoria behind the myth-a story of love and heartbreak, of devotion and grief, of strength and resilience.

About the speakers

Julia Baird is an author, historian, Walkley award-winning journalist and social commentator. Her Sydney University doctoral thesis on female politicians and the press, formed the basis of her 2004 book, Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians. She is currently the co-host of The Drum on ABC24 and a columnist for the Sydney Morning Heraldand the New York Times. She has been voted one of Australia's Top 100 Intellectuals, and was one of Advance's Fifty Leading Australian Women in 2011. 

Alex Sloan is the 2017 Canberra Citizen of the Year and is one of Canberra's best-known and loved personalities. She retired from the ABC radio after 27 years at the end of 2016.

"Victoria the Queen, Julia Baird's exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch" The New York Times Book Review

"A triumph. Genuinely fresh insights into one of history's most intriguing figures, impeccably researched and beautifully written". Leigh Sales, ABC

"A stunning achievement . . . Neither sanitized nor mythologizing, Victoria: The Queen is a remarkably lucid, endlessly engaging account of Queen Victoria's life and rule." Amanda Foreman

"This is a remarkable book; in Baird's hands, Victoria's story resonates in our own time, shedding new light on why we live the way we do now."- Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham

"Baird nails Victoria, with sympathy but not uncritically. There can be no higher praise" Lucy Sussex Sydney Morning Herald

Please register for this event online.

Pre-signings will be available from 6.15pm in the Common Room of University House. Book signings will also be available after the dinner. Dinner starts at 7pm. Tickets are $72 per person and includes a two-course meal and a glass of House wine.

If you would like to be seated with other guests, please specify this during the check-out process. We will do our best to accommodate your request.