Janet Venn-Brown: A Life in Art

Author: Peter Manning (2016)

The remarkable story of Australian painter Janet Venn-Brown - a dedicated artist and determined campaigner for Palestinian statehood.

Australian painter Janet Venn-Brown has led an extraordinary life. Moving to Rome in the early 1960s, she joined a circle of intellectuals and artists like Jeffrey Smart and Justin O'Brien, began exhibiting her work - and fell in love with Palestinian activist Wael Zuaiter. When Zuaiter was murdered by Mossad in 1972, it changed Venn-Brown's life, bringing Palestinian activism to the forefront of her life over the next four decades.

Now in her nineties and still painting, Venn-Brown has exhibited her work widely, but her paintings have never been collected so comprehensively as they are in Peter Manning's richly illustrated book. Celebrating her life and work - her 40 years in Rome, her evolution as an artist, her political engagement and travels in the Middle East, and her return to Australia in 2011 - this book is an important biography of an intrepid and passionate artist.

About the author

Peter Manning is one of Australia's most distinguished journalists. He was an investigative reporter, producer and then executive producer of Four Corners in the 1980s and head of ABC TV News and Current Affairs in the early 1990s, starting Lateline, Foreign Correspondent and Landline. He later went on to be head of Current Affairs at the Seven Network.

In 2000 Peter switched careers to academia, teaching journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney. He completed his PhD there in 2013 and is an Adjunct Professor of Journalism at the University today. He also taught at Monash and Qatar universities from 2008 to 2011. Among his previously published works are Us and Them: Media, Muslims and the Middle East (2006) and Green Bans: The story of an Australian phenomenon (with Marion Hardman, 1975).

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: NewSouth Publishing, Sydney
• Language: English