How do biographers create compelling narratives from the facts of history? In her captivating slice-of-life biographies, BIO Award winner Candice Millard shows us how it’s done, with stirring and highly effective results. In this BIO workshop, which you can see here, Candice spoke about her passion for research and her disciplined approach to crafting narrative biography in a conversation with BIO President Linda Leavell. Biographers at any level of experience can admire and learn from the skills she brings to the field.

Candice Millard

Candice Millard is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey; Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (James Garfield); and Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill. She is the recipient of the 2017 BIO Award, the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, and the PEN Center USA Award for Research Nonfiction. Her most recent book, Hero of the Empire, was named Amazon’s number one history book of 2016. Millard’s work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Time magazine. Her next book—on Sir Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Sidi Mubarak Bombay’s search for the source of the Nile—will be released in 2022.

Linda Leavell

Linda Leavell, president of BIO, won the 2014 Plutarch Award, the PEN/Weld Award for Biography, and the Modernist Studies Association Book Award for Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her current project is a group biography of three photographers and four modernist painters in the Stieglitz Circle.

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