Diana Reid’s first novel, Love & Virtue, sold to Ultimo Press in a competitive 8-way auction and was published in October 2021. The novel has been both a critical and commercial success, selling more than 50,000 copies in Australia. Rights have sold to Spain and the UK. In 2022, Love & Virtue won the Australian Book Industry Association’s (ABIA) book of the year and literary fiction book of the year; was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards in Debut Fiction; won the MUD Literary Prize; and earned Diana the Sydney Morning Herald award for Best Young Australian Novelist. Her second novel, Seeing Other People, is to be published in October 2022.
Diana graduated from the University of Sydney in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honors Philosophy) and Laws. While at University, she was very involved in independent and student theatre. In 2020, the short play she wrote for the Australian Theatre for Young People was selected for publication by Currency Press. The musical she co-wrote while still a law student, 1984! The Musical!, had its independent theatre debut in January 2020. Based on the show’s critical and commercial success, a second run was commissioned by City Recital Hall for November 2020. In August 2020, the play she co-wrote, Bickering, was set to debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was Covid-19’s cancellation of global theatre that turned Diana to novels. She wrote her first draft of Love & Virtue in five months during lockdown.
Sex. Power. Consent.
Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular – the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week – a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.
Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges’ mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are.
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.
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