About

Dr Annette Rubery is a writer, editor and theatre historian. She began her career as an actor in the children’s sitcom The Kids from 47A, where she played a kidnapped baby.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and Annette was graduating from the University of Warwick with a PhD in American Literature and Art History. She then taught at the university and worked in IT support (notably installing Millennium Bug software into Germaine Greer’s computer). After that Annette became a newspaper journalist, working for almost a decade as an arts editor on Metro.

She began her publishing career with The History Press, who brought out her first book, Lichfield Then & Now, in 2012. Since then, she has completed a biography of an 18th-century actress (The Female Rake: Peg Woffington’s Scandalous Life on the Georgian Stage) and begun another book about Sir John Vanbrugh and his circle.

Annette’s writing has been recognised in several competitions. An essay she wrote about Peg Woffington’s travesty performances won the Society for Theatre Research’s New Scholar’s Prize in 2020, and The Female Rake was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize in 2022. She has also given talks at various institutions including Yale University in the United States; the National University of Ireland, Galway; and St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

Annette is both a member of The Biographers’ Club and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In her spare time, she plays the harmonica (badly), collects Léa Stein brooches and enjoys chatting with fellow bibliophiles on Substack.