Hachette

How complex a task it is to write the biography of a writer. For writers, whose daily business is making things up, the truest experience may be one they have imagined. All biographers need to be storytellers and private detectives, but the biographer of a writer must also be a literary critic, must account for how the work relates to the life and escapes the life; beyond this, how the experience of writing it might change how the author apprehends those other parts of experience, called facts.

The story of the children Conaci and Dirimera, who were spirited away to Europe by a Benedictine missionary, Rosendo Salvado, in the mid-nineteenth century to be trained as Australia’s first indigenous monks, is arguably the first, forgotten chapter of Australia’s Stolen Generations. It is the subject of Anouk Ride’s The Grand Experiment, a compelling though problematic book, where a number of the author’s charges can also be levelled at her.