A distinguished panel of judges made up of members of Biographers International Organization (BIO) has selected ten nominees for the 2015 Plutarch Award. The Plutarch is the only international literary award presented to biography, by biographers.

Following the announcement of the ten nominees, BIO’s Plutarch Committee will next narrow the list to four finalists. BIO members around the world will vote for the winning biography from among these four distinguished books, honoring a writer who has achieved distinction in the art of biography.

This year’s ten nominees, in alphabetical order by title, are:

• Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell (Viking)
• Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (Knopf)
• Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini (Doubleday)
• Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne Heller (New Harvest)
• Irrepressible: A Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage, by Betty Boyd Caroli (Simon & Schuster)
• The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon 1952-1961,
     by Irwin F. Gellman (Yale)
• Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, by Cathy Curtis (Oxford)
• Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)
• Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva,
      by Rosemary Sullivan (Harper)

BIO first presented the Plutarch Award in 2013. Previous winners, in chronological order, are:

• Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
• Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore
• Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.

You can find more information about the award and past nominees here.

The BIO Plutarch Award Committee members for 2016 are:

James Atlas
Douglas Brinkley, Chair
Catherine Clinton
Deirdre A. David
John Aloysius Farrell
Carla Kaplan
Eve LaPlante
J.W. Renders
Will Swift    

The winning biography will be announced at the 7th Annual BIO Conference on Saturday, June 4, in Richmond, Virginia.