Last month it was autobiography’s turn, when David McCooey examined recent Australian memoirs (La Trobe University Essay, ABR, May 2006). Now it is biography’s turn: the genre will be the subject of the 2006 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecture, titled ‘Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography’. Our distinguished lecturer is Professor Ian Donaldson, Director of the ANU’s Humanities Research Centre, head of the latter’s new Biography Institute, and Consultant Editor for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is a general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (due for publication in twenty-five volumes in 2007), and is completing a life of Jonson for OUP.