Jennifer Homans’s Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (Random House) is the winner of BIO’s 2023 Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2022. The only international prize of its kind, the Plutarch is named after the famous Greek writer and is awarded to the best biography of the year. Decided by a committee of five distinguished biographers, the prestigious prize comes with a $2,000 honorarium. The 2023 Plutarch Award Committee Chair, Deirdre David, said, “For the Plutarch judges, Jennifer Homans’s magnificent biography of the choreographer George Balanchine presented a perfect model of seamless narrative integration of the life with the work.” Learn more here.

BIO member Beverly Gage was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022). The prize committee explained, “Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. . . . G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history—not at the fringes, but at the center—and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.” Learn more about the book, the jury, and the other nominees, here.

Applications for the 2024 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, one of PEN America’s literary awards, are now open. The prize, offered for a biography published in the prior calendar year that embodies excellence in the genre, comes with a $5,000 award. According to PEN, “The winning title is considered by the judges to be a work of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.” Applications are due August 1. Learn more here.

The Biographers’ Club is now taking applications for its annual £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize for an uncommissioned proposal by a first-time biographer. The deadline to apply is October 13. Learn more here.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) is now accepting applications for the 2024–2025 Cullman Center Fellowships. Fifteen fellowships are being offered for writers of all backgrounds to research at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (known as the Main Branch of the NYPL). Fellows receive a stipend of up to $75,000, 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 29. Learn more here.

The Washington Post recently published a story regarding important insights yielded from BIO member Jonathan Eig’s research for his recent biography King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Eig found the original transcript of Dr. King’s interview with Alex Haley for Playboy, which was long considered the source of King’s criticism of Malcolm X’s “fiery, demagogic oratory.” According to the newly discovered transcript, this statement appears to be fabricated, and others attributed to King in the Playboy interview are taken “significantly out of context.” This is another important reminder of how biographers can both record and correct history. Read more here.

Publisher’s Lunch recently explored how some popular AI tools, like OpenAI’s GPT-N and Google’s BERT, were trained using independently published e-books without the permission of their authors. The outlet reports that in 2014, researchers at the University of Toronto and MIT “apparently scraped . . . self-published e-books posted by Smashwords that were being offered to read for free—even though doing so violated the terms of service.” Their aggregated data became known as BookCorpus, which is made up of the text of approximately 7,000 books. Publisher’s Lunch alleges that BookCorpus became one of the large bodies of text that was fed into some artificial intelligence tools to “train” them in how to respond to queries. This marks an early flashpoint between authors and AI. Nonfiction authors are likely to deal with this the most, as these complex tools rely on accurate facts. Read more here.

Writer Caitlin Kunkel recently wrote a piece on managing one’s writing life called “A Tall Stack of Projects,” for her Substack newsletter on writing “Input/Output.” Kunkel said, “The idea behind stacking projects is that as a working writer, you need to have many things in development at once since you never know when something will hit.” She steps readers through a system of capturing and organizing everything from stray ideas to drafts in need of another set of eyes and provides a template for you to keep track of your own work. See the newsletter here and get the template here. NOTE: Click FILE—>MAKE A COPY and then edit your own copy.

“That’s the magic of revisions—every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.” —Kelly Barnhill

by Ashley Farmer
sold to Pantheon
by Eric Simonoff at William Morris Endeavor

by Kathleen Spaltro
sold to University Press of Kentucky

by Sydney Ladensohn Stern
sold to University of California Press
by Sam Stoloff at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency

More titles HERE

Lois Banner
Ellen Brown
Greg Daugherty
Patrick Dean
Jonathan Eig
Ashley Farmer
Aidan Levy
Candice Millard
Jack A. Farrell
David Levering Lewis
Joanne Mulcahy

Lisa Napoli
Judith L. Pearson
Carl Rollyson
Jennifer Skoog
Laura Snyder
Kathleen Spaltro
Rachel L. Swarns
Sydney Ladensohn Stern
Eric K. Washington
Sonja Williams

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.