Biographers International Organization

Humera Afridi and Iris Jamahl Dunkle are the 2021 winners of BIO’s Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship. Afridi, a New York-based writer of Pakistani origin, is working on The Book of Secrets: The Extraordinary Life of Noor Inayat Khan, a biography of a World War II heroine, mystic, poet, author, and musician. Khan was an Indian American woman who posthumously became a renowned and decorated war hero for her role in guerrilla tactics… Read More »

Biographies of Malcolm X, Jimmy Carter, and Charles Dickens are in the running for the 2021 Plutarch Award, which will go to the best biography of 2020, as chosen by  a distinguished panel of BIO members. The winner will be announced on May 16 during the 11th BIO Conference. You can see the five finalists as well as the other five books that made the longlist for the award, here.… Read More »

Peniel E. Joseph discussed his The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in a conversation with author and poet Ed Pavlic. You can see a video of the conversation here. Members of the Biographers’ Circle generously donated to this fundraising event. Gayfryd Steinberg, a member of BIO’s Advisory Council, and her husband Michael Shnayerson organized this philanthropic group in 2019 to support BIO’s fellowships and… Read More »

Tanya Paperny is the 2021 winner of BIO’s Hazel Rowley Prize for her proposal for Tender/Fierce: The Life and Death of My Revolutionary Prababushka. The committee was impressed by Paperny’s gripping prose about an important story of political tyranny that has been little told from a biographical perspective. “In 1938, my great-grandmother Tatiana Ivanovna Shatalova-Rabinovich was executed by the Soviet secret police and dumped in a mass grave where hundreds would soon lie,” Paperny writes.… Read More »

How do biographers create compelling narratives from the facts of history? In her captivating slice-of-life biographies, BIO Award winner Candice Millard shows us how it’s done, with stirring and highly effective results. In this BIO workshop, which you can see here, Candice spoke about her passion for research and her disciplined approach to crafting narrative biography in a conversation with BIO President Linda Leavell. Biographers at any level of experience can admire and learn… Read More »

Debby Applegate is the author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday, 2006), winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography; and Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age (forthcoming from Doubleday, November 2, 2021). Abigail Santamaria is the author of Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), and I Am Meg: The Life of Madeleine… Read More »

A distinguished panel of judges composed of BIO members has selected 10 nominees for the 9th annual Plutarch Award, which is the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. “The 2020 Plutarch Committee was well aware that we were judging last year’s biographies during a year like no other,”  says Kate Buford, Plutarch Award Committee Chair. “The books under consideration had not only to be stellar examples of the craft of biography,… Read More »

What particular challenges and opportunities lie in writing about the lives of pioneers in the fields of science, medicine, and technology? Three distinguished panelists share their experiences, ranging from making technical information accessible to general and young adult audiences, to debunking “racial champion” myths and revealing “warts-and-all” about legendary subjects. Watch a video of the workshop here. Panelists: Rayvon Fouché is Professor of American Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University.… Read More »