Applications for the 2024 PEN/Weld Award for Biography will be accepted until August 1. The $5,000 prize is awarded for a distinguished work published during the previous calendar year. All winners, finalists, and those on the longlist for this award are eligible to receive PEN America’s official emblems. Applications must be submitted by publishers or literary agents, not by the authors themselves. Learn more here.  

Applications for the Hatchards & Biographers’ Club first prize in Biography, available to United Kingdom residents only, are now being accepted. This prize was formerly known as the Tony Lothian Prize. Applicants should submit the following: an unbound proposal of no more than 20 pages, including synopsis; 10-page sample chapter; CV; and a note on the market for the book and competing literature. Submissions will be accepted until October 11. Learn more here. 

The New York Public Library (NYPL) is now accepting applications for the 2025–2026 Cullman Center Fellowships. Fifteen fellowships are being offered for writers of all backgrounds to research at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (the main branch of the NYPL). Fellows receive a stipend of up to $85,000, the use of an office with a computer, and full access to the NYPL’s physical and electronic resources. Fellows work at the center for the duration of the fellowship term, which runs from September through May. Applications are due September 27. Learn more here. 

Yepoka Yeebo’s Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World (Bloomsbury) is the winner of BIO’s 2024 Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2023. The Plutarch is the only international prize of its kind. Named after the famous Greek writer, the Plutarch is awarded to the best biography of the year by a committee of five distinguished biographers, and this prestigious prize comes with a $2,000 honorarium. The 2024 Plutarch Award Committee chair, Carol Sklenicka, said, “Yepoka Yeebo’s voice holds our attention from [the] first page to [the] last. The image she projects of John Ackah Blay-Miezah and the worlds in which he operated is illuminating, cautionary, and unforgettable.” Learn more here. 

Diana P. Parsell was a finalist for the 2024 Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir for her biography Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (Oxford University Press, 2023).  The winner and the other finalist were both authors of memoir. Learn more here. 

The cousin of Marquis James and author of Marquis James: A Biographer’s Life will be donating “much of his gathered resources” on James to the Public Library of Enid and Garfield County in Oklahoma. James, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for biographies of Sam Houston and Andrew Johnson, spent much of his life in Enid. Learn more here. 

The Christian Science Monitor recently interviewed Ann Powers, NPR’s music critic and the author of a new, experimental biography: Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, published this month by Dey Street Books. In the introduction to the book, Powers calls it “a tale of long journeying through a life that changed popular music: of a homesick wanderer forging ahead on routes of her own invention, and of me on her trail, heading toward the ringing of her voice.” Of her choice to write in an unconventional form, Powers told The Christian Science Monitor, “I think we’re living in a time when the idea of objectivity has been exposed as an idea, as an ideal, and not an achievable goal.” Read more here. 

Inc.com recently reported on a simple and effective interviewing technique utilized by Walter Isaacson, author most recently of Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023): “It’s amazing if you’re working with somebody and you ask a question and then you just shut up, how they will fill the vacuum and they’ll start to talk.” Read more here.  

by Patricia Hoerth
sold to Rowman & Littlefield Publishing

by Melissa Nathanson
sold to the University of Minnesota Press
by Henry Thayer at Brandt & Hochman

More titles here.

Debby Applegate 
Lois Banner 
Sallie Bingham 
Mary Chapman 
Iris Jamahl Dunkle 
Brad Gooch 
Marsha Gordon 
Patricia Hoerth

Will Hermes 
Pat Hoerth 
Melissa Nathanson 
Diana P. Parsell 
Carl Rollyson 
Laurie Gwen Shapiro 
Jennifer Skoog 

Whatever state your biography’s in—vague idea, proposal, well underway—BIO’s experienced biographers can help. BIO offers a one-hour coaching session via phone or email for the member discounted rate of $60. (Coaches may charge more for subsequent hours.) Learn more about the program here.

Are you a student, or do you know one who is interested in biography? BIO now has a special student membership rate. Visit the BIO website to find out more.