The winners of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Society Book Awards have been named. Phi Beta Kappa awards three book prizes annually: the Christian Gauss Award (for the field of literary scholarship or criticism), Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science (for a book that illuminates science for a broad readership), and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award (for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity). This year, Tiya Miles won the Emerson Award for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2021), an innovative biography that “traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.” Read more here. 

But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, by Charlotte Schallié (University of Toronto Press, 2022), has won the 2022 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography. See all of this year’s winners here.  

BIO is now accepting applications for its three fellowship programs. Please note that the amounts have increased from $3,000 to $5,000 for both the Rollin Fellowship and Rowley Prize, and the number of recipients has increased from one to two for the Rollin Fellowship and from two to four for the Caro Fellowship. These increased benefits, which BIO will sustain for at least five years, are thanks to gifts from Kitty Kelley and other generous friends of BIO.

• The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship awards $5,000 each to two authors working on a biographical work about an African American figure (or figures), whose story provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. This fellowship also provides the recipients with a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. The fellowship is open to all biographers anywhere in the world who are writing in English, who are working on a biography of an African American figure (or figures), and who are at any stage in the writing of a book-length biography. Applications are due February 1, 2023. More information about the fellowship is available here.
• The Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship is open to BIO members with a work in progress, who can apply to receive funding for research trips to archives or to important settings in their subjects’ lives. The deadline for applications is February 1, 2023. Learn more here.
• The Hazel Rowley Prize rewards a first-time biographer with: funding (the $5,000 award); a careful reading from an established agent; a year’s membership in BIO (including registration to the annual BIO Conference); and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. The prize is open to all first-time biographers anywhere in the world who are writing in English, who are working on a biography that has not been commissioned, contracted, or self-published, and who have never published a book-length biography, autobiography, history, or work of narrative nonfiction. The deadline for applications is March 1, 2023. Click here for more information.

The J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards are accepting applications for 2023 until December 8. The awards recognize excellence in nonfiction that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of the award’s Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake, J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. Four awards are given: two J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Mark Lynton History Prize. More information is available here. 

On October 31, a federal judge blocked Penguin Random House (PRH) from acquiring its rival, Simon & Schuster, on antitrust grounds. The New York Times reports that the judge’s reasoning is “currently under seal because it contains confidential information, and will be released later after both parties file redactions.” The Times also reports that PRH’s parent company, Bertelsmann, plans to appeal the decision. Read more here. 

Last month, The Insider reported on controversy swirling around the new biography of Anthony Bourdain, Down and Out in Paradise (Simon & Schuster, October 2022). Now, BIO member and past president Nigel Hamilton has weighed in on the situation by bringing his expertise to bear for The Conversation. Hamilton wrote, “As a seasoned biographer, I’m not surprised by any of this [controversy]. What gets my biographer’s goat, though, is the positioning of this battle as one conducted between ‘unauthorized biography’ on the one hand and ‘authorized’ biography on the other—the publisher, for hinting at scandalous content by casting the work as ‘unauthorized,’ and the aggrieved, to think they have any power to ‘authorize’ whether the biography gets published in the first place.” Read more here. 

A BIO member inquired this spring as to where they might find a handy list of all the best books focusing on writing about biography. Here’s a first pass at such, with entries compiled from titles mentioned in BIO Conference panel sessions, discussed in members’ chats, and even those written by BIO members: 

Leon Edel, Writing Lives 

Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story 

James Atlas, In the Shadow of the Garden 

Gale E. Christianson, Writing Lives is the Devil: Essays of a Biographer at Work 

John McPhee, Draft #4 

Nigel Hamilton, How to Do Biography  

Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABCs of Modern Biography 

Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft  

Carl Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide 

Uchenna Njiaju, How to Write Your Family Biography 

 Don’t see one of your favorites here? Reply to this email and let us know. 

BIO member Michael N. McGregor wrote this insightful piece for The Writer’s Chronicle based on his experience writing both a biography and a memoir. He writes, “While writing these books, I’ve kept in mind that I’m determining how others will be viewed not only by readers but also by friends and family and possibly for generations to come. I’ve tried to imagine how I’d feel if someone did that for me, knowing that a biographer or memoirist can know, at best, only a limited number of limitless things that make up a life.” Read McGregor’s thoughtful ideas here. 

by Marc Leepson 
sold to Stackpole Books 
by Katherine Flynn at Kneerim & Williams 

by Kai Bird 
sold to Scribner 
by Gail Ross at Ross Yoon Literary 

More titles HERE

Debby Applegate 
Kai Bird 
John A. Farrell 
Beverly Gage 
Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos 
Allison Gilbert
E. Stanly Godbold
Lyndall Gordon 
Nigel Hamilton 
Nathan Hobby 
Steve Kemper 
Kitty Kelley 
Marc Leepson 

Bernice Lerner 
Andrew Lownie 
Michael N. McGregor 
Kevin McGruder 
Megan Marshall 
Eugene Meyer 
Lydia Moland 
Lisa Napoli 
Todd Peppers 
Elaine Showalter 
Jennifer Skoog 
Tim Spofford 
Claire Tomalin 

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.