Awards

Frances Wilson Wins 2022 Plutarch Award

Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has won the 2022 Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2021. Wilson, a biographer and critic, is also the author of The Courtesan’s Revenge: The Life of Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King (Faber & Faber, 2003) How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (Harper, 2011), and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Guilty Thing was a finalist for the 2017 Plutarch Award.  

Named after the famous Greek writer, the Plutarch Award is presented annually by the Biographers International Organization to the best biography of the year, chosen by a committee of five distinguished biographers. The award comes with a $1,000 honorarium. 

In his remarks for the Plutarch Award ceremony, filmed in advance of and debuted at the 2022 BIO conference, Plutarch Award Committee Chair Nigel Hamilton said that the nearly 200 books reviewed for this year’s award were “a real testament to the ongoing golden age of biography that we still live in, despite the many trials our democracy is undergoing, especially, I might add, the assault on something we used to take for granted: telling the truth, the very viable truth based on real, not completely imaginary, facts.” 

In her acceptance remarks, Wilson said: “I see Burning Man as my American book. It was written for the most part when I was fortunate enough to be a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library in 2018. And I benefitted while I was living in New York, I benefitted enormously from the conviviality and generosity of other biographers, including the late great James Atlas, who I miss very much.” 

Wilson also spoke of the important influence New Mexico had upon both herself and Lawrence: “Lawrence rested all his hopes in America, which he saw as his paradise after the years in Hell. And while he of course inevitably quarreled with America, his experience of New Mexico was, he said, one of the most important in his life. I just want to quote what Lawrence said about New Mexico, because it’s so stunning and I absolutely agree with him: ‘The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul and I started to attend.’” 

In conclusion, BIO President Linda Leavell remarked upon the importance of Santa Fe to the founding of the organization, which Wilson agreed was a pleasant irony.  

Along with Hamilton, members of the 2022 Plutarch Award Committee were Heather Clark, Gretchen Gerzina, Catherine Reef, and Carl Rollyson. You can see the 2022 longlist here and the 2022 shortlist here.  

Sunlight in the Garden of Biography: A Conversation with Megan Marshall, Winner of the 2022 BIO Award

Interview conducted by Holly Van Leuven, editor of The Biographers Craft

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in the April 2022 issue of The Biographers Craft, the members’ publication of BIO. Megan Marshall is the distinguished biographer of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, April 2005, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize), Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2013, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography) and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, February 2017). A more complete reckoning of Marshall’s accomplishments can be read here.

While it is a longstanding tradition for the BIO Award Winner to be interviewed for The Biographer’s Craft, this interview also presents a unique situation: I have known Megan since 2011, when I was a student in her personal essay-writing class at Emerson College, in which I admitted one evening after the other students streamed out of the room that I was interested in writing biography. Among her many kindnesses to me, Megan introduced me to BIO in 2012. While we certainly never imagined a scenario a decade later where I would be editing TBC at the time that Megan won the BIO Award, here we are. Our ensuing conversation reflects some of our shared history and, in part, the powerful role of mentorship in biography. This conversation has been condensed here.

It seems common for very reasonable and talented writers to feel like the title “biographer” is too heavy a cloak to step into, even if they have done significant research on a subject or published a biography. “Writer” seems more approachable than “biographer.” What do you make of that idea?

I think every writer, whatever the genre, feels they aren’t a “real” writer until their first book is out there, between hard (or soft) covers. And I think we’re right to feel that way. The need to prove ourselves keeps us going through the hard slog of research and writing, and enforces a necessary humility in the face of so big a project—the project of knowing and summing up another person’s life. It gives us a proper respect for those who have already gotten there, those from whom we can learn how it’s done. And yet, the work of biography is so long. I also believe it’s reasonable, especially if you’re writing a first biography of someone, to consider yourself that subject’s biographer, once you are well into the work. No one else is! (Let’s hope. Competing biographers are an all-too-common added pressure!)

When did you first start to consider yourself a biographer?

When I began work on The Peabody Sisters in 1985, I thought the book was going to be a kind of historical survey of women’s choices, maybe a bit like Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which I loved. I knew a few biographers—Justin Kaplan, an enormously generous man, was a friend. I met Jean Strouse at a party in [Kaplan’s] Cambridge home while she was researching Alice James, and Jim Atlas was a guest speaker in a poetry class of mine at Harvard. I knew how hard the work was, the suffering they all experienced as their projects dragged on, as well as the intense absorption and even identification they felt with their subjects, all of which I probably found subliminally attractive in a masochistic sort of way. To quote Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own: “It’s the hard that makes it great.” I’ll admit my heart sank when I realized I was writing a “full-dress” biography (a term Robert Richardson used), and I lived in fear thereafter, because I had no idea what I was doing! But of course, no one does, the first time out.

I kept telling myself, just write the book you would want to read on the subject—that’s all you can do. I had read a lot of biographies, including [those by] Kaplan, Strouse, and Atlas, of course, all excellent models. Maybe the form had also entered my subconscious, showing me the way.

Your biographies have been on the scene, shaping the genre, and influencing the cultural conversation for more than 15 years now. But you have also had many other responsibilities beyond “biographer” at the same time, not to mention all you did before The Peabody Sisters burst onto the biographical scene, and new responsibilities you’ve taken on since publishing Elizabeth Bishop. What is it like to have such a successful career as a biographer, to the extent that it might obscure your other accomplishments? Or is it freeing, like having discrete chapters of a book, to know when you are in a “biography” period of your life?

I have a lot of trouble devoting myself to more than one thing at a time. When my two daughters were young, I knew I’d have to put my writing on the back burner. They needed too much of me, and their “deadlines” couldn’t be put off. They were born seven years apart, so the years of their youths were many! My editor at Houghton Mifflin (the second of five, over 20 years), said he would “do me a favor” and take my book off the schedule. I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, but I guess that meant they weren’t going to call me on the carpet, and to their credit they didn’t. But it was very hard, because I think I’m essentially a creative person, and I don’t feel that great if I’m not making something with words. There was a long dark time for me professionally, which may have been hard on my daughters, even as I felt I was “giving” them my all. I wasn’t sure I’d ever finish The Peabody Sisters, and I had to come to terms with that possibility, which in a way was liberating—like being taken off the schedule, I guess.

I admire younger biographers who seem to do a better job of combining parenthood with their writing lives—I think of Abby Santamaria and Louisa Thomas, to name just two of many. I don’t know how they do it, but perhaps it’s because they expect to do it. And, terrible as the child care system is now, it’s much better than it was when my kids were young. No one feels guilty about “putting” their kids in daycare, and daycare is better and more widely available. When I was little, there was almost nothing, and my artist mother struggled. The Massachusetts public schools didn’t have kindergartens until sometime in the 1960s, and where I grew up in California, preschool (a half-day cooperative, which parents staffed) was avant-garde—as outlandish as breastfeeding and natural childbirth!

It was easier for me to teach and write than to be a parent and write. I didn’t begin teaching full time until I was in my early 50s, when I was fortunate to find a good job at Emerson College, with many talented student writers like you, Holly.

We are in BIO because we believe the writing of biography is urgent and important work. And yet good biographies involve numerous challenges: they often take longer to write than other kinds of books; they rely so much on paper records (which can mean expensive research); and they often don’t reap the financial rewards of many other kinds of writing. How do you see biography continuing for the next decade or so?

There is an undying interest in biography in readers. The question is how to tap into it. I’m excited about the many new ways biographers are going about the work these days. There have always been experiments, but now there are more than ever. Perhaps the permutations are a bit like the way film and television are also morphing, transmuting. The audiences may be fragmenting along with that, and the financial rewards uncertain. But one should never write with the expectation of material success, even as you must write with the conviction that others will want to read the story you’re telling. The narrative needs to throb with that urgency—or at least pulse!

What are you currently working on? How has the pandemic disrupted or diverted your plans? What is on your horizon for the rest of 2022 and beyond?

I’ll be talking a bit about this—the disruptions of recent years—in my keynote speech. I hope BIO members will listen in! One current project I’m particularly pleased about, though, is the first Library of America edition of Margaret Fuller’s writings. It’s shocking there has never been one. I’m coediting the book with two excellent Fuller scholars, Brigitte Bailey and Noelle Baker. We hope the book will be out in 2024.

Finally, on a personal note if I may, I have always been impressed with (and blessed by!) your gifts as a mentor. You have a knack for appearing at just the right time and offering of your time and talents in a way that is meaningful. One example: In 2012, I had landed in Los Angeles for the first time ever when you emailed to say, “I’m not sure when you’ll be in Los Angeles, but this BIO conference is going on. . .” It was being held that weekend, within walking distance of where I was staying (a small miracle for LA!) but I wouldn’t have even known about it without your writing me. Do you have thoughts to share about mentorship? How have you gotten so good at it? Is it a practice you cultivate?

The pleasure of helping someone out is much more lasting than what a friend calls the “ta-da! moments” that have come my way. It’s a happier kind of happiness. And I’m also enormously grateful to my own mentors and more experienced writer friends who believed in me before I did, who thought I could finish The Peabody Sisters when I wasn’t sure of it. I remember them all, and often precisely what they said, because I lived on their words of encouragement. I would like to be helpful to others in the same way, and I try to see the opportunities. It’s also true that young writers grow up to become friends and colleagues from whom I can learn. And who knows, maybe one day you will be helping me out. I remember when two different senior biographers I’d admired deeply asked me to write blurbs for their new books. I felt a little sad about it—these were gods to me, and gods don’t need blurbs, especially from me! But I felt honored to be asked, and I did my best to return their generosity in this small way.

I want to say something more about Jim Atlas. I didn’t know him well, as so many others in BIO did. But he was the first biographer I ever met, when he visited Jane Shore’s poetry workshop. (Notice I call him a “biographer,” even though he wasn’t yet done with his Delmore Schwartz—but he was a biographer in my eyes!). I don’t think he ever knew this, but after I’d published The Peabody Sisters, I told Lindy Hess, another departed friend who ran the Columbia Publishing Course for decades, that I’d always wanted to write a short biography for Jim Atlas. She asked me which subject I’d choose, and I said Margaret Fuller. Lindy said—write the book, but don’t do it for Jim’s series. He can’t pay enough. I probably wouldn’t have written Margaret Fuller if it weren’t for Jim. And then Jim finally asked me to write a short book and the idea still excited me. I suggested Elizabeth Bishop, and I was under contract for a 30,000-word biography when I discovered a whole cache of Bishop papers that I knew meant that book would get bigger, too. Jim was the shadow in my garden of biography all along, to adapt the title of his last book—or maybe he was the sun!—and I’m glad to have the chance to say so here.

Megan Marshall will deliver the Keynote Address at the 2022 BIO Conference on Saturday, May 14, at 12:30 p.m. (Eastern).

 

2022 Rowley Prize Winner Announced

Laura Michele Diener has won the 2022 Rowley Prize.

The 2022 Hazel Rowley Prize Committee has named Laura Michele Diener as the winner of this year’s prize. The $2,000 prize is awarded annually to a first-time biographer and is accompanied by a careful reading from an established agent, a year’s membership in BIO, and publicity through the organization.

Diener has won the award for her proposal for a biography of the Norwegian-Danish writer Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), whom the committee called “an extraordinary woman who lived through tumultuous times.” After an unusual childhood under the tutelage of her archaeologist father, Undset worked as a secretary while attempting to earn a living as a writer. The success of her novels allowed her the freedom to travel to Italy, where she explored her spiritual yearnings and entered into a passionate but tormented marriage. It was the demise of that marriage and the financial demands of her children that led to the writing of her most famous works—sweeping historical novels of medieval Norway, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. In addition to her medieval work, she wrote innovative novels exploring the situation of contemporary women struggling to balance families and artistic longings.

Diener’s book project, which bears the working title A World Perilous and Beautiful, will be the first full-length, English-language biography of Undset, situating her within the intellectual and political crosscurrents of the first half of the 20th century.

Diener received her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction in 2015 from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published creative essays in multiple journals including Under the Sun, Dappled Things, and Numero Cinq. She attended Vassar College and earned her doctorate in history at Ohio State University in 2008. She has taught medieval and ancient history at Marshall University in West Virginia since 2008, where she directed the Women’s Studies program from 2014 to 2021. Her academic work focuses on women as authors and artists in the Middle Ages.

Diener is the eighth recipient of the BIO Hazel Rowley Prize, which has been awarded since 2014. She will accept the prize on Saturday, May 14, at the 2022 BIO Conference. The 2022 Hazel Rowley Prize Committee members were Natalie Dykstra (chair), Deborah Lutz, and Steve Paul.

Arrington, Goldstein Win 2022 Caro Research/Travel Fellowships

The 2022 Caro Fellowship Committee, comprised of Carla Kaplan (chair), Marc Leepson, and Barbara Savage, has named two recipients for this year’s Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowships. The fellowships, established in 2018, allow BIO members with works in progress to receive funding for research trips to archives or to important settings in their subjects’ lives. This fellowship is a reflection of BIO’s ongoing commitment to support authors in writing beautifully contextualized and tenaciously researched biographies. This year’s recipients are Lauren Arrington and Bill Goldstein.

Lauren Arrington is the author of two previous group biographies, The Poets of Rapallo (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Revolutionary Lives (Princeton University Press, 2016), which were supported by fellowships at Cambridge University, Boston College, Trinity College Dublin, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Arrington earned her doctorate at Oxford University, and her essays have been commissioned by TLS, Literary Hub, and Public Books, among others. The Caro Fellowship will support Arrington’s research on the sculptor Lenore Thomas Straus, one of the women artists featured in Arrington’s current project about radical women artists working in Depression-era America.

Bill Goldstein reviews books and interviews authors for NBC’s “Weekend Today” in New York, and was the founding editor of The New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown, having worked on the book as a 2019–2020 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. His book, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, was published in 2017 by Henry Holt and Co.

Arrington and Goldstein will receive their awards on Saturday, May 14, during the 2022 BIO Conference.

Marion Orr Wins 2022 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship

Photo credit: Ellen Dessloch

Marion Orr is the winner of the 2022 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for his proposed biography of former U.S. Congressman Charles Diggs Jr. Orr’s reintroduction of the consequential, but forgotten legislator impressed the committee.  2022 Frances Rollin Prize Committee chair Eric K. Washington said, “Orr’s lucid prose and keenly paced narrative engaged us through the uneven landscape of American legislative politics towards an ill-fated horizon.”

“Diggs’s illustrious career was marred by personal troubles that eventually ruined him,” Orr says of the subject of his biography, The House of Diggs: The Untold Story of Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr.’s Activist Leadership: From Emmett Till to Anti-Apartheid and the Scandal that Nearly Erased a Social Justice Legacy. The book, which is to be the subject’s first full-length biography, is under contract with University of North Carolina Press. “I have roughly two or three more chapters to write,” Orr says, as he continues to plumb “Diggs’s rarely seen personal papers, original interviews with family members and political associates, FBI documents, and documents gathered from U.S. presidential libraries.”

Marion Orr is the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he once served as director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy (2008–2014). This will be his first biography; his previous books include Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore (University Press of Kansas, 1999), which won the Policy Studies Organization’s Aaron Wildavsky Award for the best policy studies book, and the coauthored book, The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics, and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton University Press, 1999), which won the American Political Science Association’s award for the best book published on urban politics.

The Frances Rollin Fellowship awards $2,000 to an author 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 includes a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. The fellowship advances BIO’s commitment to remediate the disproportionate reflection of Black lives and voices in published biography, and to encouraging diversity in the field.

The fellowship commemorates 19th-century author and activist Frances Anne Rollin Whipper—who wrote under her nickname-turned-pen name “Frank A. Rollin”—whose 1868 biography, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, about a Black abolitionist journalist, physician, and Union Army officer, positioned her among the first recorded African American biographers. The Black press particularly underscored the significance of her precedent and called for more biographies of African Americans, a call which this fellowship, in her honor, seeks to carry on.

The 2022 Frances Rollin Prize Committee members were Eric K. Washington (chair), Tamara Payne, and Adam Henig.

Orr is the second recipient of the Frances Rollin Fellowship, which was established in 2021. He will receive the award during the 2022 BIO Conference on Saturday, May 14.

BIO Announces Finalists for 2022 Plutarch Award

The Plutarch Committee of Biographers International Organization (BIO) is proud to announce their Shortlist for the 2022 prize for the best biography of the year, published in English–the only award of its kind made by fellow biographers.

In the opinion of the Committee, the five finalists demonstrate virtues of fine narrative, deep research, outstanding and artful literary construction, as well as a determination to tell the truth about the subject that are a model for practitioners of our craft.

The Shortlist is as follows, in alphabetical (author) order:

 

Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (Little, Brown, 576 pages)

This is a stylistically innovative, deeply researched, and passionately written biography of Mildred Harnack, an American who was part of the German resistance during WWII and who was beheaded by personal order of Hitler. Harnack’s great-great niece, Rebecca Donner, takes an enormous risk by writing novelistically and setting her story in the present tense. The risk pays off: Part historical drama, part spy novel, Donner’s book expands the parameters of biography itself. This is an extraordinary portrait of a woman who made the ultimate sacrifice for justice, and whose name deserves greater recognition.

Robert Elder, Calhoun: American Heretic (Basic Books, 640pp)

In Calhoun: American Heretic, Robert Elder provides a brilliant revisionist biography of the scorned proponent of nullification, and of slavery as a “positive good.” Historians have swept aside U.S. antebellum Senator Calhoun as an outmoded figure, but Elder suggests we ignore at our own peril the challenge to federal power that originated in the founding generation of this country.

Fiona Sampson, Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (W.W. Norton, 322pp)

Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the reductive legend of the sickly lady lying on her sofa on Wimpole Street, Fiona Sampson’s Two-Way Mirror offers an impressive reevaluation of a woman whose poetry made her one of the most-admired writers of her time. A woman oppressed for years by her controlling father, Barrett Browning made herself into a poet so accomplished that she rivalled Tennyson in praise and popularity, ultimately forging a life in Italy, with a husband and son, and inventing herself anew. Sampson’s writing and interpretation rivals that of her subject, in this compelling work.

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, Francis Bacon: Revelations (Knopf, 880 pp)

A finely written, illustrated and exhaustively researched life of the artist Francis Bacon by Pulitzer Prize winners Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. The authors have tracked down many obscure sources and conducted nearly 150 interviews to help us understand the psychological, artistic, and romantic pressure points that made Bacon one of the twentieth century’s great artists. The smells, sights, and sounds of Bacon’s world are vividly rendered in Revelations, while the many high-quality reproductions of his paintings provide important artistic context throughout.

Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 488pp)

Frances Wilson’s brilliantly conceived and executed biography of D.H. Lawrence presents his life through the surprising structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which follows the poet’s struggles through hell, purgatory and paradise in search of, and accompanied by, Beatrice. Lawrence’s peripatetic life, traveling and writing his way from England to Europe, Ceylon, New Mexico and Mexico, reflect his battles with personal relationships, muses, and physicality, all while compulsively writing them into his changing visions of the world.

 

 

2022 Plutarch Award Committee:

Nigel Hamilton (chair)

Heather Clark

Gretchen Gerzina

Catherine Reef

Carl Rollyson

 

BIO Announces Longlist for 2022 Plutarch Award

Longlisted for BIO’s 2022 Plutarch Award—the only major award made by fellow biographers for the year’s best biography, published in English—are the 10 titles listed at the link below.

2021 Plutarch Award Committee Chair Nigel Hamilton said of assembling the longlist: “The judges were deeply impressed by the level of biographical professionalism, intelligence, research, style, and originality demonstrated in the nearly 200 biographies that were carefully considered for the prize. These were books published in a time not only of a global pandemic, but of an ongoing cultural war on fact and civilized discussion in our media and society, epitomized in the recent banning of books. We congratulate the authors and publishers of all the works we read. Here, though, are the 10 biographies we have ultimately longlisted for the prize for their outstanding merits—qualities that included fairness, honesty, heart, and respect for truth—arranged in alphabetical order by authors’ surnames.”

You can see the longlist for the award here.

Following the announcement of the nominees, the Plutarch Award Committee will narrow the list to five finalists. The Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2021—honoring a writer who has achieved distinction in the craft—will be revealed during the 12th  BIO Conference on May 15, 2022, which is being held virtually this year.

2021 Plutarch Jury members:
Nigel Hamilton (Chair), Heather Clark, Gretchen Gerzina, Catherine Reef, Carl Rollyson

Megan Marshall Wins 2022 BIO Award

Megan Marshall is the winner of the 13th BIO Award, bestowed annually by the Biographers International Organization, to a distinguished colleague who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.

Marshall is the author of three biographical works: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, and Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction; and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), a finalist for the Christian Gauss Prize in Literary Criticism of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

She is also the first Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor at Emerson College in Boston, where she teaches narrative nonfiction, life writing, and the art of archival research in the MFA Creative Writing Program. Marshall is a passionate advocate for the genre of biography as well as a practitioner, and a founder of the New England Biography Series at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which has presented several public programs each year for over a decade on topics related to biographical research and writing. Her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Atlantic, London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub. In support of her research and writing, Marshall has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy, and T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as well as a visiting professorship at Kyoto University. She has lectured widely on her work and appeared in documentary films on Fuller, Thoreau, and Poe.

Kai Bird, chair of the BIO Award Committee, stated: “Selecting a BIO Award winner is always a difficult matter because there are so many worthy candidates—but this year our committee quickly came to a unanimous decision when Megan Marshall’s name was mentioned.”

Upon receiving the news that she had won the award, Marshall said, “This is an astonishing and unexpected honor, and deeply meaningful. I remember the first presentation [of the award] to Jean Strouse, whose example led me into biographical work . . . and now all through the years, such great exemplars of the craft have been awarded this prize. To think of joining their distinguished company is quite overwhelming.”

In addition to Strouse, previous BIO Award winners are David Levering Lewis, Hermione Lee, James McGrath Morris, Richard Holmes, Candice Millard, Claire Tomalin, Stacy Schiff, Ron Chernow, Arnold Rampersad, and Robert Caro.

Marshall will give the keynote address at the 2022 BIO Conference on Saturday, May 14.