Biographers International Organization

Caroline Fraser won the 2018 Plutarch Award for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book had previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, among other honors. Fraser received her award at the ninth annual BIO Conference on May 20. The Plutarch is the world’s only literary award given to biography by biographers. Named after the famous Ancient Greek biographer, the Plutarch is determined by secret ballot from a formal list… Read More »

By James Atlas A great biographer is someone who writes great biographies. A revolu- tionary biographer is someone who writes revolutionary biographies. Since the publication of his massive, ingenious, and mesmerizing debut, Shelley: The Pursuit, published when he was twenty-nine, Richard Holmes has written seven biographies and assembled four collections of biographical essays uniform only in their strange, unclassifiable aura. Holmes’s essential principle is not simply to write about his subjects but to inhabit… Read More »

TBC: What was it like being president? Will Swift: Haven’t I always been the president of BIO? We shift our identities more easily than we think—I can barely remember not being in the role. Have two years actually passed since I took over the presidency at the Richmond conference? Time flows swiftly when you are fully engaged in a passionate endeavor. I love supporting writers and writing. At the age of seventy, I heed… Read More »

Acclaimed literary biographer Richard Holmes will receive the 2018 BIO Award at BIO’s upcoming conference in New York and give the keynote speech on May 19. As a preview of that, James Atlas interviewed Holmes; you can read the interview here.… Read More »

The recent election for the BIO board of directors marked the end of Will Swift’s two-year term as president. Will shared some thoughts with The Biographer’s Craft on his achievements, the future of BIO, and what lies ahead for him. You can read the interview here.… Read More »

By Linda Leavell “All biographies are group biographies. All lives are surrounded by a constellation of other lives,” said Susan Hertog, at a previous BIO Conference. “Every biographer must choose how much space to devote to each person.” So why foreground several lives at once instead of making most of them secondary in a conventional biography or else subsuming them all in a history? What draws writers and readers to group biography? What particular challenges… Read More »

By Deirdre David In recalling the seven years of research that went into the first volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power (1982), Robert Caro describes driving from Austin, where he was working at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, to the Hill Country that spreads out to the west in an “incredible empty panorama.” Stopping his car, he spotted in the distance the ranch in the valley of the Pedernales River… Read More »

Natalie Dykstra and Marina Harss will each receive $2,500 as the winners of the first Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship. BIO introduced the fellowship in 2017 to honor the Caros’ work and help biographers establish a sense of place to delineate their subject’s character. You can read more about Dykstra, Harss, and the fellowship in the March Letter from the Vice President by Deirdre David.… Read More »