BIO Announces Finalists for 2022 Plutarch Award

March 28th, 2022

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

March 7th, 2022

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

February 11th, 2022

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.

BIO Presents its 2021 Editorial Excellence Award to Bob Bender of Simon & Schuster

October 26th, 2021

Update: The recording of this event is available here.

Bob Bender will receive BIO’s 2021 Editorial Excellence Award, presented annually to an outstanding editor of biography, on Thursday, November 18 from 7 p.m to 8 p.m. Eastern, at an online event featuring several of his authors: Marie Arana, David W. Blight, Scott Eyman, and Jeff Guinn.

Registration for the Zoom event is available at this link.

Bender is Vice President and Executive Editor of Simon & Schuster, where he has worked since 1981. He acquires a wide range of nonfiction, including biography and autobiography, history, current events, popular science, popular culture (primarily film and music), and narrative nonfiction with a distinctive voice. Authors that he has published also include Muhammad Ali, Marie Arana, Miles Davis, Jonathan Eig, David Hackett Fischer, Linda Greenhouse, John Kerry, Naomi Klein, Pauline Maier, David McCullough, Gilda Radner, James Shapiro, and Jean Edward Smith.

Kai Bird, chair of BIO’s Award Committee, with Tim Duggan, Ruth Franklin, Peniel Joseph, Candice Millard, and Will Swift, praised Bender for his “cultivation and support for so many illustrious biographers over many decades.”

Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is the author of Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, chosen by the American Library Association as the top nonfiction book of the year; Bolivar: American Liberator, winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography; the memoir American Chica, a finalist for the National Book Award; two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights; and The Writing Life, a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post, where she was editor-in-chief of Book World. She was the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress, founder of the Literary Initiatives division of that library, and one of the principal architects of the National Book Festival. In 2020, she received an award for her lifetime literary work from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. A writer-at-large for The Washington Post, she divides her time between Washington, D.C., and Lima, Peru.

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won BIO’s Plutarch Award; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others.

Scott Eyman was the literary critic at The Palm Beach Post and is the author or coauthor of 15 books, including the bestselling biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend; Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart; Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille; Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer; Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford; and, with the actor Robert Wagner, the bestsellers Pieces of My Heart and You Must Remember This. Eyman also writes book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He and his wife, Lynn, live in West Palm Beach.

Jeff Guinn is the bestselling author of many books, including War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, The Texas Rangers and an American Invasion; Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s Ten-Year Road Trip; The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple; Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson; Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie & Clyde; The Last Gunfight; and The Autobiography of Santa Claus. The former books editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and an award-winning investigative journalist, he is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. He lives in Fort Worth.

BIO’s Editorial Excellence Award has been presented since 2014. Past recipients are Tim Duggan, Robert Gottlieb, Gayatri Patnaik, Jonathan Segal, Ileene Smith, Nan A. Talese, and Robert Weil.

David Levering Lewis Looks at Two Black American Leaders in BIO Conference Keynote

June 8th, 2021

David Levering Lewis accepts the 2021 BIO Award from Pamela Newkirk.

After receiving the 2021 BIO Award from Pamela Newkirk, David Levering Lewis spoke on “Black Biography Matters: A Prophet and A President.” The prophet was W. E. B. Du Bois, the subject of Levering’s two-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. The president was Barack Obama.

Lewis started his talk by giving a mini-bio of an unnamed figure: A biracial American who did not face the extreme discrimination other Blacks did, thanks in part to having one white parent and living in a relatively tolerant state. This figure, though, came to embrace his Black roots as well as the culture and aspirations of Black Americans.

Lewis said that if his audience assumed he was talking about the first Black president of the United States, they were correct. But Lewis pointed out that many of the details of Obama’s life as a biracial American applied to Du Bois as well, another man who embraced his Blackness and achieved greatness. The two, Lewis said, shared “strikingly similar biographical profiles,” and his introduction featured the “interweaving of like-minded quotations” from Obama’s and Du Bois’s autobiographical writings.

Lewis’s goal with this introduction was to illustrate “the significance of a largely unsuspected parallelism in the racial coming of age of two of the most influential American men of the last 100 years.” But as Lewis went on to show, Obama’s career as president ultimately diverged from the path Du Bois took as a scholar and activist, though he also noted that there would have been “no Obama presidency without the Du Bois civil rights legacy.”

After adding a few more details to each man’s biography (noting that in Du Bois’s hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, “black families were rarer than Democrats”), Lewis turned to Obama’s idea of the “audacity of hope,” the title of the book Obama wrote before announcing his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Lewis called that expression an example of political optimism—an optimism reflected in candidate Obama’s belief that racism was an old problem that the country had transcended. Lewis said he “had seemed to resolve those dilemmas of nationality and color unforgettably proposed by Du Bois in his foundational text The Souls of Black Folk.” And Americans seemed eager to embrace the idea of a “post-racial” future.

But then, in not so few words, Lewis said, “Not so fast.” He explained Du Bois would not have accepted that the country had transcended race. “Rather, he could remind us that he predicted that race still would remain the predicate of our American experience long after the formal dismantling of segregation.”

Lewis recounted how, as a presidential candidate, Obama tried to generate universal appeal by not being threatening to white voters, while winking reassuredly at Black ones. And he might have been “just progressive enough to intrigue old troublemaker Du Bois.” But Obama didn’t live up to the promise of the “audacity of hope” and become a transformational president. And Black scholars who pointed out that John McCain won the white vote in 2008 by 10 points over Obama had their op-eds dismissed as being out of sync with the supposed post-racial era the country had entered.

Lewis said that Obama didn’t seize the opportunity the Great Recession presented when he took office in 2009. Obama was economically timid and pursued a “futile strategy” of conciliation with his Republican critics. Though there were critics on the left, too, who berated Obama’s timidity. Still, Lewis said Obama had notable first-term successes, such as saving the auto industry and signing legislation that created the first federal consumer protection bureau. And Lewis called passage of the Affordable Care Act the signature accomplishment of Obama’s presidency (while noting it was a bonanza for the insurance industry).

Turning back to Du Bois, Lewis said he should avoid speculating on what his subject might have made of the Obama presidency. But he said he would any way, given that Du Bois had “spoken rather presciently to our times” in the 1950s about what he saw as a lingering American problem: too many people were willing to live in comfort “even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men.” Du Bois, Lewis said, moved from seeing racism as the central American problem to a broader economic emphasis on class discrimination, while still recognizing that race was a “component of America’s DNA.” Obama, on the other hand, saw race “as of limited value in formulating an economics of redress.”

In the end, Lewis suggested, Obama and DuBois stood at opposite poles. “For Du Bois, racism defined the American social contract.” For Obama, “the less said about race relations, the better.”  Lewis admitted that the Obama presidency ended “with much to its credit.” But the idea of a post-racial reset for the nation “had already been fatally belied by worsening disparities now become irrevocably color coded,” by a Supreme Court decision that hamstrung the voting rights of Black and Latinx voters, and by criminal justice misdeeds and police violence that fueled protests and the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of these problems were only exacerbated during the Trump presidency.

Lewis closed with words from Du Bois, which he believes are relevant for the 2022 elections. Du Bois wrote that the majority of voters had to challenge a political system run by a minority based on their wealth and power. Du Bois said some might call his ideas for change “socialism, communism, reformed capitalism or holy rolling. Call it anything—but get it done.”

BIO Honors Award Winners at Conference

June 8th, 2021

As it does every year, BIO recognized the winners of several awards on the first day of its 2021 virtual conference. The presentations and winners’ remarks were prerecorded; winners of all but two of the awards had already been announced. You can see a video of the award presentations here.

Sonja D. Williams

Shepard Service Award
On the video, attendees learned that Sonja D. Williams was the winner of the Ray A. Shepard Service Award, given to honor BIO volunteers whose work goes above and beyond the call of duty. It comes with a statuette and a lifetime membership. The award is named for its initial winner, Ray A. Shepard, who almost single-handedly organized the first BIO Conference in 2010. The award was last given in 2018.

Williams has worked as a broadcast journalist and has won three consecutive George Foster Peabody Awards for Significant and Meritorious Achievement, for writing and producing program segments for groundbreaking documentary series distributed by National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and the Smithsonian Institution. Williams won the Shepard Service Award for her work, along with Lisa Napoli, in producing podcasts for BIO featuring interviews with biographers. Williams said she especially appreciated the award “since it’s named for a fellow biographer and longtime BIO member Ray Shepard.” Williams noted that she served on BIO’s board with Shepard and that he was an early supporter of the podcast.

Jeff Flannery

Biblio Award
The other award winner publicly announced for the first time was Jeff Flannery, who was honored with the Biblio Award. This award recognizes a librarian or archivist who has made an exceptional contribution to the craft of biography. Flannery was the head of the Reference and Reader Services Section in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress (LOC) until his retirement at the end of 2020.

Tim Duggan, a member of BIO’s Awards Committee, introduced biographer A. Scott Berg, whose subjects include Woodrow Wilson and Max Perkins, who recounted his experiences relying on Flannery’s expertise. Berg said that while researching at the LOC, Flannery was “more than an overseer, he became an integral part of my research process.” Flannery assisted several other honored biographers, including BIO Award-winners Candice Millard, James McGrath Morris, and Ron Chernow.

The previously announced winners were Humera Afridi and Iris Jamahl Dunkle for the Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship; Tanya Paperny for the Hazel Rowley Prize; and Rachel L. Swarns for the Frances “Frank” Rollins Fellowship.

A. N. Wilson Wins 2021 Plutarch Award

May 21st, 2021

A. N. Wilson’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens (HarperCollins) has won the 2021 Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2020. Wilson is a prolific writer, whose previous books include biographies of Charles Darwin, Prince Albert, C. S. Lewis, and Queen Elizabeth II, among many others. He is also a prize-winning novelist.

Named after the famous Greek writer, BIO awards the Plutarch to the best biography of the year, chosen by a committee of five distinguished biographers. The award comes with a $1,000 honorarium.

“During an unprecedented year marked by political upheavals, the COVID pandemic and many publishing challenges,” said Kate Buford, chair of the Plutarch Committee, “we were struck by the compelling humanity and deft artistry of Wilson’s biography. It is a biographer’s biography.”

Buford added in her taped remarks for the 2021 BIO Conference that Wilson “passionately and elegantly manipulated the genre, the form [of biography] to get at the mystery of Dickens’s craft.”

Photo by Sam Ardley

In his acceptance remarks, Wilson said he was “left speechless to have been put in such wonderful company”—both the biographers judging the award and the other writers who made the Plutarch longlist. Although Dickens might seem like a character from the distant past, Wilson said, he was “constantly arrested by how much he is our contemporary, how much he realizes that we carry around in ourselves our own childhoods, which never leaves us; the inner child is always directing us.”

In addition to honoring Wilson, the Plutarch Award Committee gave a Special Citation to Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Lessons for Our Own, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Crown), in recognition of its summoning of Baldwin’s penetrating voice and eyes that remind us of the post–Civil War and post-civil rights betrayals of racial justice. In announcing the citation, committee member Ray Shepard said that Glaude “reminds us of the post-Civil War, post-civil rights betrayals of racial justice. He warns us of slipping into a 21st century betrayal unless we begin again and heed Baldwin’s prophetic words.”

Along with Shepard and Buford, members of the 2021 Plutarch Award Committee were Barbara Burkhardt, Andrew Lownie, and Holly Van Leuven. The committee originally chose ten semi-finalists before selecting five finalists for the 2021 prize and then choosing Wilson’s book as the winner. You can see all of this year’s semi-finalists and finalists here.

Four Win Chip Bishop Fellowships

May 7th, 2021

Gabriella Marie Kelly-Davies, Paula Broussard, Trina Young, and Helen Bain are the winners of this year’s Chip Bishop Fellowships. Each will have the fee waived for the upcoming BIO Conference, held online May 14-16. Kelly-Davies is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sydney. Broussard is a freelance writer from Los Angeles. Young, from Maryland, writes about popular music. Bain is a Ph.D. candidate at
King’s College, London.

The Chip Bishop Fellowship was established by BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris to honor former BIO member Chip Bishop Fellowship and to help biographers in need.