Biographers International Organization

To reserve your place at the Robert Gottlieb Celebration from 6:00-8:00 PM, Wednesday, December 3, 2014, at the New York Society Library, 53 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075, purchase a ticket by clicking on the button below. Select number of tickets 1 ticket $45.00 USD2 tickets $90.00 USD… Read More »

More than four decades ago, while working as a freelance journalist in Malawi, Philip Short received a letter from Penguin: Would he be interested in writing a biography of Malawian president Hastings Banda, for the publisher’s series Political Giants of the 20th Century? Short readily agreed, adding now, “I suspect they had no idea that I was then 23 years old!” Since that auspicious start, Short has a made his mark writing biographies of world… Read More »

By Steve Weinberg We biographers covet awards for our books, as do novelists and poets and essayists and journalists from all media. After all, writers tend to receive little recognition and less cash. My advice is not exactly to forget about awards, but something similar—relax, because most of us will never win and many of the “best” biographies, however that is measured, will not receive the prize recognition they deserve. Michael Burgan asked me to… Read More »

Linda Leavell’s Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2013. The winner and the three finalists were revealed at a ceremony held at the closing of the fifth annual Compleat Biographer conference at UMass Boston on May 17.   “I’m truly humbled by this award, and I’m also humbled by my company here, the fellow nominees,” Leavell said… Read More »

More than 200 biographers, including ones from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, attended the fifth annual Compleat Biographer Conference, held May 17 at the University of Massachusetts Boston. As at past conferences, one of the day’s highlights was the presentation of the BIO Award at the afternoon luncheon, which this year went to Stacy Schiff, author of Saint-Exupéry: A Life,A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of … Read More »

BIO members selected Brian Jay Jones to serve as president and Cathy Curtis as vice president in an election that concluded on April 30. Jones has been a BIO board member since 2009 and served as BIO’s secretary and vice president. He is the author of Jim Henson: The Biography and Washington Irving: An American Original. Curtis, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer, has been a board member since 2013 and served as… Read More »

BIO’s Program Committee is putting the final touches on the fifth annual Compleat Biographer Conference, which is returning to Boston, site of the inaugural conference. In a sign of how BIO has grown since 2010, more than 200 biographers are already signed up for this year’s event, compared to the 163 who attended the first conference. And this year, some of the panel sessions and tours are already sold out. As always, one of the… Read More »

This May, BIO will give its first Editorial Excellence Award to Robert Gottlieb. The award honors an editor who has made outstanding contributions to the field of biography. A former editor in chief at both Simon & Schuster and Knopf, Gottlieb has edited countless best-selling novels as well as modern classics of the biographer’s craft. He is also a biographer himself. A paperback edition of his most recent book, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters… Read More »