A panel of judges from BIO has selected 10 nominees for the 14th annual Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers.

“The Plutarch Award Committee is delighted to offer our selections for the ten best biographies published in 2025. We read close to two hundred books covering the most diverse set of imaginable subjects…and were impressed with a great many, which made our task a gratifying challenge,” says Mary Dearborn, Chair of the Awards Committee. “We found that those we valued most highly were both compellingly written…and outstandingly researched in terms of depth, quality, and in many cases, originality of approach. After our year of reading biographically, we’re extremely excited about the books we chose, ample evidence that the genre of biography is alive and thriving in the literary world.”

BIO President Steve Paul added, “This is such an impressive list of books, which speaks to the robust state of the craft of biography. We are always grateful for the time and effort our judges put into highlighting the great work of biography.”

The titles, listed alphabetically by authors’ last names, are:

• Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Daniel Brooks, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Kate Culkin, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press)
• Ruth Franklin, The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press)
• Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright)
• Max Perry Mueller, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books)
• Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner)
• Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus Books)

The winner will be announced during the 2026 BIO Conference, occurring May 28 and 29 at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.