NEWS: Advance Notice of the Publication of Royal Lovers, Mistresses (and Bastards): This illustrated book with text and picture research by Susanna de Vries is now in course of publication by David Batemen, New Zealand, for sale through publishers in New Zealand, Australia and Europe.
NEWS: New biography out March 2008: The Many Lives of Daisy Bates.
Susanna de Vries is an international author and former lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. She writes full time but gives occasional study days as part of the ‘Travel and Destinations’ programme run by the Continuing Education Dept of the University of Queensland. She also lectures to branches of the Australian Fine and Decorative Art Society. Of Anglo-Irish extraction Susanna’s biological father was a distinguished author. Adopted at birth and raised by loving adoptive parents, during World War 2, their London home was bombed and Susanna spent years living with relatives or in hotels. Reading everything she could find became her refuge and comfort.
She attended boarding school at Ascot and then went to study at the Sorbonne University in Paris and won a scholarship to study Art History in Madrid. She speaks fluent Spanish and French and has lived and worked in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Florence, Barcelona and Sydney but now lives in Brisbane and has nine grandchildren.
Susanna’s fourteen books have won her literary awards in Ireland and Britain, an Order of Australia for services to literature and a Winston Churchill Fellowship. She has twice been short-listed for the Queensland Premier's Non-Fiction awards. Great Australian Women and Blue Ribbons, Bitter Bread: the life of Joice Loch Australia’s Most Decorated Woman have become Australian classics.
