Diana Reid in-conversation with Meg Mason

Join us in-coversation between Diana Reid and Meg Mason for the lauch of Love & Virtue.

Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85401483349?pwd=RkJacGVyeEduNnhDL0NvcFdXU0ZzZz09

Meeting ID: 854 0148 3349

The subject of a hotly contested publisher auction, Love & Virtue by Diana Reid, 25, takes aim at virtue signalling and moral ambiguity in a contemporary university setting. In the novel, protagonist Michaela is thrust into university culture filled with statusloving students. At risk of being the fish-out-of-water she befriends the confident Eve – beautiful and driven. After a shocking event one night during O-week, Michaela is forced to confront the power dynamics in a close-knit friendship group.

As her relationship with Eve grows more complicated, their personal responses to what happened that first week send shockwaves throughout the campus. Reid, who wrote the novel when her plans were waylaid by the global pandemic,

says, ‘growing up on social media, and going to university in a climate where moral outrage was very fashionable, I wanted to explore the idea that being a good person, and being seen to be a good person are distinct. A campus is the perfect backdrop to explore this—university being a place where people are thrown together at a very vulnerable time in their lives, and are constantly performing different ideas and identities.’ 

Written with a strikingly contemporary voice that is both wickedly clever and incisive, issues of consent, class and institutional privilege, and feminism become provocations for enduring philosophical questions we face today.

About THE AUTHOR:

Diana Reid is a Sydney-based writer, who graduated from the University of Sydney last year with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Hons Philosophy)/Laws. In January 2020, her career in theatre was off to a promising start: the musical she co-wrote and produced, 1984! The Musical!, debuted and she was set to direct and write theatre performances in Sydney and over to the Edinburgh Fringe. When COVID-19 saw the cancellation of global theatre, she decided

she’d spend her time in shutdown writing a manuscript. Love & Virtue is her debut novel.

About MEG MASON:

Meg Mason, author of Sorrow & Bliss, began her career at the Financial Times and The Times of London. Her work has since appeared in The Sunday Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written humour for The New Yorker and Sunday STYLE, was a GQ columnist for five years and a regular contributor to Vogue, marie claire, and ELLE.