February 1st, 2018
BIO’s Plutarch Award Committee has chosen the four books highlighted below as the finalists for this year’s Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for a biography that is chosen by fellow biographers. BIO members will have three months to read the finalists and vote for the winner. The Plutarch Award will be presented on Saturday, May 19, at the Ninth Annual BIO Conference in New York.
To see a list of the nominees for 2018 and learn more about the Plutarch Award, go here.
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Ali: A Life, by Jonathan Eig, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Eig interviewed nearly everyone still living who knew Muhammed Ali, including his ex-wives, and crafted those interviews, along with much additional primary source material, into a deft, enlightening, and enlivening narrative of the life of an American icon.
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Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell, Doubleday: In an elegantly written, expertly researched, and commanding narrative of the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, John A. Farrell has created in a single volume a rich and deeply affecting portrait of perhaps the most complex, fascinating, and darkest of American presidents.
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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, Metropolitan: Fraser’s work is both a haunting depiction of Laura Ingall Wilder’s life, work, and collaboration with her flamboyant, unstable daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane, and a surprising history of how the pioneer experience led to American conservative values. Fraser demonstrates that literary history is woven into the very fabric and destiny of the nation.
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Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, by Victor Sebestyen, Pantheon: The first major biography in English of Vladimir Lenin in twenty years, Victor Sebestyen’s riveting work draws on newly available archives and the author’s gift for sustaining a highly suspenseful narrative to present a far-reaching and very human portrait of the father of the Russian Communist state.
Published under: Awards, News, Plutarch Award
January 16th, 2018
Here are the nominees for the 2018 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2017, listed in alphabetical order by author:
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Grant, by Ron Chernow, Penguin: In his latest magisterial work, Pulitzer Prize winner Chernow (Washington, etc.) persuasively resuscitates and reinterprets the much-maligned Civil War general and U.S. president as a hero for our time, a leader whose humane instincts and far-sighted policies began to heal the war-torn nation and forge a modern American political conscience.
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Ali: A Life, by Jonathan Eig, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Eig interviewed nearly everyone still living who knew Muhammed Ali, including his ex-wives, and crafted those interviews, along with much additional primary source material, into a deft, enlightening, and enlivening narrative of the life of an American icon.
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Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell, Doubleday: In an elegantly written, expertly researched, and commanding narrative of the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, John A. Farrell has created in a single volume a rich and deeply affecting portrait of perhaps the most complex, fascinating, and darkest of American presidents.
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Milosz: A Biography, by Andrzej Franaszek; trans. by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker, Harvard: Franaszek’s biography of the great Polish poet Czelaw Milosz, translated from Polish, traces the immensely complex political and moral life of a writer and diplomat caught in the crosscurrents of twentieth-century European xenophobia, nationalism, and war, with 1951, when Milosz decided to break with his homeland and with communism, as the turning point. A highly dramatic rendering of a relevant life.
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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, Metropolitan: Fraser’s work is both a haunting depiction of Laura Ingall Wilder’s life, work, and collaboration with her flamboyant, unstable daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane, and a surprising history of how the pioneer experience led to American conservative values. Fraser demonstrates that literary history is woven into the very fabric and destiny of the nation.
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Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, by Francine Klagsbrun, Schocken: A vivid portrait of Israel’s first female prime minister, Lioness is a stellar example of how to narrate aspects of a contradictory and often stereotyped character in a nuanced, fresh, and clear-eyed way. With scrupulous research and contextualization, Klagsbrun makes an eloquent case for the rehabilitation of the activist “Iron Lady” of Israeli politics as a world figure.
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Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, by Megan Marshall, Houghton: With extraordinary steadiness of voice throughout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Megan Marshall (Margaret Fuller) depicts the complex life of the poet Elizabeth Bishop. She effectively and unobtrusively uses her own interactions as a student in Bishop’s Harvard classes to cast light on Bishop’s character and ultimately to illuminate how the biographer is drawn to her craft. A brave, groundbreaking work.
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Jane Crow: The LIfe of Pauli Murray, by Rosalind Rosenberg, Oxford: With impeccable research and a compelling recounting, Rosenberg tells the full story, for the first time, of remarkable twentieth-century American social activist Pauli Murray. “A minority within a minority,” Murray used her complicated identity—mixed race born into the Jim Crow South, a woman, and a transsexual—to tear down seemingly impenetrable social justice barriers. This timely biography ensures that Murray’s unique contributions to American history are duly recognized.
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Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, by Victor Sebestyen, Pantheon: The first major biography in English of Vladimir Lenin in twenty years, Victor Sebestyen’s riveting work draws on newly available archives and the author’s gift for sustaining a highly suspenseful narrative to present a far-reaching and very human portrait of the father of the Russian Communist state.
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Gorbachev: His Life and Times, by William Taubman, Norton: This first full-fledged biography of Soviet-system reformer Mikhail S. Gorbachev, an idol of the West and an anti-hero among many in his own country, has been long awaited and is indispensable to understanding the Russia of our times. From probing original research, Pulitzer Prize- winner Taubman (Khrushchev) builds a complex and nuanced portrait of a leader who diminished the role of the Communist Party, with Perestroika and glasnost as a result, and changed the face of the former Soviet Union.
BIO PLUTARCH AWARD COMMITTEE MEMBERS, 2018:
Anne C. Heller, chair
Kate Buford
Nassir Ghaemi
Brian Jay Jones
Andrew Lownie
Julia Markus
J.W. (Hans) Renders
Ray Shepard
Will Swift, ex-officio
Published under: Awards, News
December 10th, 2017
By Dona Munker, TBC New York Correspondent
Cathy Curtis presents the Editorial Excellence Award to Robert Weil.
On November 8, Robert Weil, editor-in-chief and publishing director of Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, received BIO’s fourth annual Editorial Excellence Award. He joins Nan A. Talese, Jonathan Segal, and Robert Gottlieb, as winners of this honor. Introduced by one of his authors, Thomas Jefferson biographer Annette Gordon-Reed, Weil said that he thinks he may have become an editor because editing fulfills “a yearning to rescue and nurture.” The evening, which also included a panel discussion, was cosponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Follow this link to view his speech and hear Gordon-Reed and five other biographers Weil nurtured share what makes an editor legendary.
Attendees at the event included, from left to right: Kai Bird, Will Swift, Julia Reidhead, Linda Gordon, Ruth Franklin, Annette Gordon-Reed, David Levering Lewis, Robert Weil, Yunte Huang, and Max Boot.
Published under: Awards, Editorial Excellence Award
Tags: Annette Gordon-Reed, Robert Weil
November 10th, 2017
Karen Adler Abramson and the staff at the John F. Kennedy Library
Archives received their 2017 Biblio Award last month from BIO’s James
McGrath Morris. From left to right, the honorees are Laurie Austin,
Textual/Audiovisual Reference Archivist; Maryrose Grossman, Audiovisual
Reference Archivist; Stacey Chandler, Textual Reference Archivist; and
Karen Adler Abramson, Director of Archives. The Biblio Award is presented
annually to recognize a librarian or archivist who has made an exceptional
contribution to the craft of biography.
Published under: Awards
Tags: Biblio Award
October 7th, 2017
In honor of the work of Robert and Ina Caro, Biographers International Organization has set up an annual research and travel fellowship. BIO members with a work in progress can apply to receive funding for research trips to archives or to important settings in their subject’s lives. This fellowship is a reflection of BIO’s ongoing commitment to support authors in writing beautifully contextualized and tenaciously researched biographies.
The Caro Research/Travel Fellowship is restricted to support of works of biography, e.g., not of history, autobiography, or memoir. The application deadline is February 1, 2018. In the spring of 2018, BIO will award either one $5,000 or two $2,500 fellowships, based on the judgment of the following panel: Kate Buford, Deirdre David, and Marc Leepson.
To apply, go here.
Published under: Awards, Caro Research/Travel Fellowship, News
Tags: Ina Caro, Robert Caro
October 7th, 2017
BIO is now accepting applications for the 2018 Hazel Rowley Prize. The aim of this prize is to help a first-time biographer of real promise in four ways: through funding (the $2,000 prize); by securing a careful reading from at least one established agent; a year’s membership in Biographers International Organization (BIO); and publicity through the BIO website and The Biographer’s Craft newsletter, among other outlets.
The prize is named in memory of Hazel Rowley (1951–2011), who was born in London, educated in England and Australia, and was a longtime resident of the United States. A BIO enthusiast from its inception, Hazel understood the need for biographers to help each other. The prize named for her will be given for the fourth time at the next BIO conference, in late spring 2018. Judges for the 2018 prize are the distinguished biographers Stacy Schiff and James Atlas.
The prize is open to citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. and Canada who write in English, are working on a biography that has not been commissioned, contracted, or self-published, and who have never published a biography, history, or work of narrative nonfiction. Biography, as defined for this prize, is a narrative of an individual’s life. Although, group biographies and innovative ways of treating lives will be considered. To apply, click here. The deadline for entries is March 1, 2018.
Published under: Awards, Biography, Rowley Prize
Tags: Hazel Rowley
August 8th, 2017
Responding to the recent trend of awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography to authors of memoirs, Biography International Organization has written to Pulitzer Prize administrator, Mike Pride, asking that the board overseeing the Pulitzer Prizes to create a separate category for biography and a new category for autobiography and memoir. Pride recently left his position but turned over the letter to Dana Canedy, his replacement as administrator.
In a letter signed by BIO Board president Will Swift and Advisory Committee chair Debby Applegate, BIO specifically asked the Pulitzer Prize Board to do the following:
(1) review the recent history of the prize for “Biography or Autobiography”;
(2) consider biographies on their own merits and thus as their own unique prize category;
(3) consolidate autobiography and memoir into a new and distinct category.
TBC first addressed this issue in June, when James McGrath Morris interviewed David Nasaw on the topic. Nasaw, chair of the Pulitzer Prize Biography/Autobiography Committee in 2015, and a two-time finalist for the Biography Pulitzer prize, said, “It was our understanding that a memoir is a piece of a life, a moment of a life, a part of a life, and it is not documented. There is no corroborating material, there are no additional interviews, there are no newspaper articles, and there is no context provided. A memoir is a work—as the title makes clear—of memory. Autobiography and biographies are not works of memory.”
Commenting on BIO’s effort, Swift said, “I am grateful to Cathy Curtis, Steve Weinberg, Jamie Morris, Brian Jones and most of all Debby Applegate for helping me think through the complex issues we present to new Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy. I look forward to hearing from her and we would be delighted to meet with her and other representatives of the Pulitzer board.”
The entire letter is reprinted here.
Published under: Awards, News
Tags: Pulitzer Prize
June 30th, 2017
Here are the finalists for the 2017 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2016, listed in alphabetical order by title. The winner will be announced on May 20 at the Eighth Annual BIO Conference at Emerson College in Boston.
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Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey by Frances Wilson
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Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich
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Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams by Louisa Thomas
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Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin
BIO PLUTARCH AWARD COMMITTEE MEMBERS, 2017:
Cathy Curtis
Deirdre David
John Farrell (Chair)
Anne C. Heller
Linda Leavell
John Matteson
Hans Renders
David O. Stewart
Will Swift
Amanda Vaill
Published under: Awards, News
