2026 Plutarch Award Shortlist Announced

April 16th, 2026

A panel of judges from BIO has narrowed down the 10 nominees for the 14th annual Plutarch Award to five. The titles, listed below, include feedback from the awards committee:

• Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — “Nicholas Boggs delivers fresh insights on the life of a beloved American literary and political hero with this moving and beautifully-composed biography that reveals how novel perspectives can generate new ways of looking at a life.”
• Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright) — “In his complex, engrossing biography of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first independent prime minister, Howard French situates Africa’s decolonization within the context of international Pan-Africanism and the U.S. civil rights movements.”
• Max Perry Mueller, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books) — “In startlingly innovative fashion, insisting that Native American history and biography deserve an entirely new approach, Max Perry Mueller limns the Native chief Wakara, an elusive but central figure in the shaping of the American Southwest.”
• Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner) — “Francesca Wade combines an examination of Gertrude Stein’s life and work with an engrossing account of the struggle over her posthumous reputation, which began with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, and after many decades, eventually included Wade herself.”
• Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus Books) — “In this riveting biography, Graham Watson interrogates how Charlotte Brontë’s story came to be written, shedding new light on not only the Victorian writer but the construction and nature of biography itself.”

Of the 10 books longlisted, BIO President Steve Paul said, “This is such an impressive list of books, which speaks to the robust state of the craft of biography. We are always grateful for the time and effort our judges put into highlighting the great work of biography.”

The Plutarch Award is the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. The winner will be announced during the 2026 BIO Conference, occurring May 28 and 29 at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. View past Plutarch winners here.

Samantha Ege and Heath Brown Win 2026 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowships

April 13th, 2026

Samantha Ege and Heath Brown are the recipients of the 2026 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, awarded for biographical works-in-progress that significantly advance our understanding of the Black experience. Both writers impressed the selection committee with their vividly rendered portraits of very different subjects, each engaging and accessible to a broad general audience.

Ege won for her project, Fabulous Is the Word: The Life and Legend of Nora Douglas Holt, a biography of the Harlem Renaissance-era nonpareil who was a pioneering musicologist, composer, critic, and, as she put it, “sensual socialite.”

Brown won for his project, The Pilot of Jonestown, a biography of Norman Ijames, a Black aviator who was fatefully connected to the 1978 cult massacre at Jonestown, Guyana, a tragedy that is still seared in modern memory.

Samantha Ege is a music historian and concert pianist renowned for her work on 20th-century Black women in classical music. Her 2024 New York Times article on Nora Holt, “The Curious Case of ‘Naughty Little Nora,’ a Jazz Age Shape Shifter,” was celebrated for introducing readers to this important yet forgotten figure. Her book South Side Impresarios was widely praised, and her scholarship extends to major publications, broadcasts, and performances. As a concert pianist, she has performed internationally, championing composers such as Holt, Florence Price, and Margaret Bonds. Named a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 2025, Ege has built an influential career on her path to reshaping musical history.

Heath Brown is a professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, and his master’s and PhD from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. His several books on politics and history include his most recent on the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris presidential transition: Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the White House (University Press of Kansas, 2024). Previously, he studied radical religious movements like the Tea Party and conservative homeschooling. He’s also written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly magazines, as well as appeared on CNN and MSNBC.

The 2026 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship marks our sixth year. When we hatched out the award’s parameters and guidelines in 2020, we felt certain that countless untold biographies were waiting out there to deepen our understanding of Black experience across the Americas — and the response proved it. Yearly, a wide range of writers have answered the call. That momentum continues to grow. The CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography just introduced the David Levering Lewis Fellowship on the African Diaspora. Funded by the esteemed biographer’s $1 million gift, which is to be matched by the Leon Levy Foundation. As a past Leon Levy Biography Fellow, I’m excited to see the Rollin Fellowship and the Lewis Fellowship working with kindred aims to champion and expand the field of Black biography.

— Eric K. Washington, Chair, The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship

BIO’s Rollin Fellowship, named for Frances (“Frank”) Anne Rollin Whipper, one of America’s first recorded African American biographers, seeks to help remediate the disproportionate reflection of Black lives and voices in published biography and to encourage diversity in the field. BIO launched the Rollin Fellowship in 2020 and first presented an award of $2,000 to a single winner in May 2021 and again in 2022. As of May 2023, with a generous donation from Kitty Kelley, BIO increased the award to $5,000 each for two winners. The fellowship also awards the recipients a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. This year’s Rollin Prize Committee consisted of Eric K. Washington (chair), Tamara Payne, and Emily Bernard.

T.J. Stiles Honored with the 2026 BIO Award

April 6th, 2026

T.J. Stiles, noted author of bestselling books about historical American figures, has been chosen to receive the 2026 BIO Award from Biographers International Organization (BIO). Established in 2010, the annual award honors an individual who has advanced the art and craft of biography. The award will be presented on May 29, 2026, at BIO’s annual conference in New York City.

“The BIO Awards Committee is excited to present this award to T.J. Stiles,” said Kathleen Stone, chair of the committee. “As an author, he is dedicated to exploring history through the stories of individual lives. His innovative choice of subjects covers a wide range, from General George Custer to Jesse James to Cornelius Vanderbilt, thereby enlarging our understanding of our history. ”

T.J. has previously received many honors for his work. Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Spur Award for Best Western Biography, and the William H. Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt was honored with the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War received the 2003 Ambassador Book Award.

Stiles is a member of BIO’s Advisory Council. A past Guggenheim Fellow, NEH Public Scholar, and Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he also practices and teaches traditional karate with the Japan Karate Association. A native of rural Minnesota, he now lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two children. He is currently working on a biography of Theodore Roosevelt.

The BIO Award recognizes a colleague who has made distinguished contributions to the art and craft of biography. Previous honorees are, in alphabetical order, Kai Bird, Taylor Branch, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, Richard Holmes, Kitty Kelley, Hermione Lee, David Levering Lewis, Megan Marshall, Candice Millard, James McGrath Morris, Dawn Porter, Arnold Rampersad, Stacy Schiff, Jean Strouse, and Claire Tomalin.

Stiles will deliver the keynote address at the 2026 BIO Conference on Friday, May 29, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

2026 Plutarch Award Longlist Announced

March 17th, 2026

A panel of judges from BIO has selected 10 nominees for the 14th annual Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers.

“The Plutarch Award Committee is delighted to offer our selections for the ten best biographies published in 2025. We read close to two hundred books covering the most diverse set of imaginable subjects…and were impressed with a great many, which made our task a gratifying challenge,” says Mary Dearborn, Chair of the Awards Committee. “We found that those we valued most highly were both compellingly written…and outstandingly researched in terms of depth, quality, and in many cases, originality of approach. After our year of reading biographically, we’re extremely excited about the books we chose, ample evidence that the genre of biography is alive and thriving in the literary world.”

BIO President Steve Paul added, “This is such an impressive list of books, which speaks to the robust state of the craft of biography. We are always grateful for the time and effort our judges put into highlighting the great work of biography.”

The titles, listed below, include feedback from the awards committee:

• Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — “Nicholas Boggs delivers fresh insights on the life of a beloved American literary and political hero with this moving and beautifully-composed biography that reveals how novel perspectives can generate new ways of looking at a life.”
• Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W. W. Norton & Company) — “In this remarkable biography, Daniel Brook resurrects a forgotten genius whose revolutionary ideas about sex and gender made him a target of Nazi ire and an inspiration to generations of innovative thinkers.”
• Kate Culkin, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press) — “Kate Culkin’s examination of the personalities, experiences, and work of Ellen and Edith Emerson provides an important contribution to Transcendentalist history and a wittily corrective portrait of a famous father and the daughters upon whom he relied.”
• Ruth Franklin, The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press) — “Ruth Franklin introduces you to an Anne Frank you never knew; in gorgeous prose, she reinvigorates Anne’s world and reveals her surprising afterstory.”
• Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright) — “In his complex, engrossing biography of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first independent prime minister, Howard French situates Africa’s decolonization within the context of international Pan-Africanism and the U.S. civil rights movements.”
• Max Perry Mueller, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books) — “In startlingly innovative fashion, insisting that Native American history and biography deserve an entirely new approach, Max Perry Mueller limns the Native chief Wakara, an elusive but central figure in the shaping of the American Southwest.”
• Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (W. W. Norton & Company) — “With virtuosic spirit of place, pivoting from 19th century Paris to exotic Tahiti, Sue Prideaux sheds new light upon the iconoclastic autodidact Paul Gauguin, interweaving the omnivorous, indomitable life of her so-called WILD THING artist with his resplendently uninhibited paintings.”
• Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — “In Pride and Pleasure, a seamless epic of our Founding Era, Amanda Vaill spins the ambitious, cunning lives of the Schuyler sisters, Amanda and Eliza—wife of Alexander Hamilton—as they play out against the complex politics of the American Revolution; the result is a dual biography redolent of romance and intrigue.”
• Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner) — “Francesca Wade combines an examination of Gertrude Stein’s life and work with an engrossing account of the struggle over her posthumous reputation, which began with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, and after many decades, eventually included Wade herself.”
• Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus Books) — “In this riveting biography, Graham Watson interrogates how Charlotte Brontë’s story came to be written, shedding new light on not only the Victorian writer but the construction and nature of biography itself.”

The winner will be announced during the 2026 BIO Conference, occurring May 28 and 29 at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. View past Plutarch winners here.

2026 BIO Conference Registration Now Open!

February 16th, 2026

Registration for the 2026 BIO Conference is now open. Co-sponsored with The Leon Levy Center for Biography, the two-day event will occur both in person and online May 28 and 29, 2026, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Topic-specific roundtables will be held virtually approximately one week before the conference.

Attending in person provides rich opportunities for socializing with fellow biographers and choosing from various panels. It comes at an affordable price of $295 before April 1 and $395 thereafter. For those who prefer streaming access only to selected panels and presentations, the cost is just $49 for members. Those needing financial assistance may also apply for a Chip Bishop Fellowship here.

Click here for more detailed program information. Click here to register for the conference via Humanitix.

The conference will again feature panels, off-site tours, a workshop, short readings of new books by members, presentations of the BIO Award and fellowship winners, and the much-anticipated announcement of the Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2025.

BIO aims to provide a safe, welcoming environment for everyone. The Board of Directors asks all registrants to read the BIO Code of Conduct on the registration form and agree to abide by it. Please direct questions about registration to Michael Gately, BIO’s executive director.

Call for 2026 BIO Conference Proposals

September 4th, 2025

The 2026 BIO Conference is tentatively scheduled for May 28–29 in New York City, and the Conference Committee—co-chaired by Jared Stearns—invites members to submit panel proposals for consideration.

The Committee welcomes proposals in three broad categories:

• Basics – guidance for beginning biographers
• Craft – exploring the art and technique of biography
• Issues, Business, Publishing & Innovations – topics of broad professional interest

The conference theme will be announced soon; however, proposals on any relevant topics are encouraged. For inspiration, you may wish to review programs from past BIO Conferences.

To submit a proposal, please fill out this Google Form with the following:

• A panel title
• Your name and contact information
• A description of the panel (100–150 words)
• A list of potential panelists and a moderator (panelists should be published biographers or recognized experts, and the group should reflect a diversity of voices; preliminary names only are fine)

Please note: not all proposals will be accepted. The Program Committee may modify selected proposals to create a balanced and engaging conference.

Important dates:

• Proposal deadline: October 1, 2025
• Notification of decisions by: December 1, 2025

Panelists and moderators will receive complimentary registration for the conference. Travel and lodging expenses, however, are not covered.

Questions? Please contact Jared Stearns.

Thank you for helping us shape another dynamic BIO Conference—we look forward to your ideas!

BIO Announces Two Winners for the 2025 Plutarch Award

June 6th, 2025

Biographers International Organization (BIO) announced today that two books would share its 2025 Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2024. The winners are Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Harper). The Plutarch is the only international prize of its kind as it’s selected by a committee of five distinguished biographers, chaired this year by Ruth Franklin. The prestigious award comes with a $3,000 honorarium, which will be equally divided between the two winners.

“As works of biography, these books are so different that they are almost impossible to compare,” said 2025 Plutarch Award Committee Chair Ruth Franklin. “We thought it was worth acknowledging both: Scapegoat for its innovative structure and engaging, intelligent style; and Candy Darling for its emotional pull and sensitive handling of its subject.” BIO President Steve Paul added, “The pool of Plutarch finalists reflects what feels like a bountiful period for biography in general. I commend our panel of judges for breaking precedent and highlighting two wildly different but highly engaging life stories.”

“Shaved her legs and then he was a she,” Lou Reed sang in “Walk on the Wild Side,” his song about Candy Darling and other New York City counterculture icons of the 1960s and 1970s. As Carr demonstrates in this haunting and deeply sympathetic portrait, it wasn’t anywhere near that easy. From Candy’s years growing up in Long Island—as a child who “looked like a girl dressed in boy’s clothing,” she was abused by her father as well as her peers—and continuing through her glamorous yet down-and-out twenties, when she was crashing in friends’ spare rooms even as Andy Warhol made her one of his “superstars,” her life was marked by discrimination, poverty, and physical trauma, which culminated in hormone treatments that likely contributed to her tragic death from stomach cancer at age twenty-nine. Working with archival interviews done by a close friend of Candy’s as well as her own detailed research, Carr insists on her subject’s individuality even as Candy comes to represent something larger: the immense bravery of living as a transgender person at a time when it was illegal for men even to wear women’s clothing in public.

With a novelist’s eye for the extraordinary, Hughes-Hallett conjures an entire bygone world: the masques, dances, art, food, and attitudes towards “effeminacy,” among other curious subjects, of Jacobean era England. At the center of it all is George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, who rose from humble beginnings to become the favorite—and lover—of King James I, as well as (in the words of his unreliable detractors) “a devil, a spotted monster, a comet that disrupted the natural order.” Hughes-Hallett sketches Villiers with obvious sympathy, and her portrait is stylish, vivid, and frequently surprising. This biography combines sexual politics with passages on warfare and Westminster, resulting in an engagingly modern take on a dramatic period of history.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett responded to news of her win, saying, “I’m thrilled that my book and I are joining the illustrious list of past winners of this prize, and I love the prize for its name. I learnt from him how flexible biographers must be. How we have to find strategies to deal with sources that contradict each other or deliberately mislead. I learnt from him the thrill of inventing forms that could make a Life feel life-like. I got the message that a biographer is first and foremost a teller of stories.”

Hughes-Hallett also congratulated her co-winner, Cynthia Carr, “Our subjects are separated by centuries, but I like it that they both set up challenges to repressive sexual orthodoxy. Both basked in celebrity, and suffered for it. Some stories never get old.”

Cynthia Carr said of her win, “I especially appreciate this recognition given that Candy Darling was a transgender icon, and we now have a federal government telling us that trans people do not exist – and have no rights. I began my work on this in 2013. It wasn’t easy. Candy never even had a place to live and research material was scattered. But I decided to write the book after learning about the huge gulf between her glamorous image and the realities of her life.  I can also assure you that Candy Darling was never political, but she knew who she was.”

Cynthia Carr (New York) is the author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Candy Darling won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was featured as a best book of the year by The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, and NBC New York.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett (London) is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year, the Costa Biography Award, and was chosen by The Sunday Times as the biography of the decade. Her other books include the novel Peculiar Ground; Fabulous, a collection of short stories; and the cultural histories Cleopatra and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Her biography, Scapegoat, was the winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews.

The 2024 Plutarch Committee consisted of five esteemed biographers: Ruth Franklin (Chair), Vanda Krefft, David Maraniss, Lisa Napoli, and Lance Richardson. Together they considered over 150 titles   from the US and UK. The top ten biographies were announced in March 2025 and from those were chosen the five finalists, announced in April.

Information about the three other finalists is available here. Learn more about the longlist titles here.

2025 Plutarch Award Shortlist Announced

April 22nd, 2025

A distinguished panel of judges from the Biographers International Organization (BIO) is proud to announce the five books shortlisted for the 2025 Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. These five biographies uphold the high standard set by earlier Plutarch winners for the quality of research, the literary merit of the writing, and the originality and significance of the project.

This year’s five shortlisted titles and detailed information are listed below in alphabetical order by author’s name. Information about the longlist titles is available here.

Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr
“Shaved her legs and then he was a she,” Lou Reed sang in “Walk on the Wild Side,” his song about Candy Darling and other New York City counterculture icons of the 1960s and 1970s. As Carr demonstrates in this haunting and deeply sympathetic portrait, it wasn’t anywhere near that easy. From Candy’s years growing up in Long Island—as a child who “looked like a girl dressed in boy’s clothing,” she was abused by her father as well as her peers—and continuing through her glamorous yet down-and-out twenties, when she was crashing in friends’ spare rooms even as Andy Warhol made her one of his “superstars,” her life was marked by discrimination, poverty, and physical trauma, which culminated in hormone treatments that likely contributed to her tragic death from stomach cancer at age twenty-nine. Working with archival interviews done by a close friend of Candy’s as well as her own detailed research, Carr insists on her subject’s individuality even as Candy comes to represent something larger: the immense bravery of living as a transgender person at a time when it was illegal for men even to wear women’s clothing in public. 

The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton
Deeply researched, engagingly written, and with urgent timeliness, The Icon and the Idealist explores the shared goals and contentious rivalry of the two very different women who led the fight for female reproductive freedom in the United States. On the one hand, the icon: radical, attractive, and flamboyant Margaret Sanger, a former New York City slum nurse who founded the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn and later Planned Parenthood. On the other, the idealist: plain-looking, college-educated Mary Ware Dennett, who, after getting ditched for another woman by her architect husband, left New England for bohemian life in New York City. Initially friends and allies, both Sanger and Dennett believed that a woman’s freedom depended on her ability to control childbearing. They clashed, bitterly, over strategy. Gorton deftly avoids the trap of a right/wrong dichotomy and instead portrays the nuanced, flawed humanity and heroic strengths of each reformer.

John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg
Greenberg succeeds admirably in breaking through the encrusted story of an icon to reveal the figure beneath the myths. The John Lewis brought to life in this meticulously reported work overcomes not only the brutal racism of the Jim Crow South but his own doubts and vulnerabilities as he moves through the stations of the cross of the 1960s civil rights movement and on to an astonishing second act as the “conscience of Congress” during seventeen terms in Washington. This is a classic, straightforward biography, and the depth of Greenberg’s research shines through, illuminating the importance of John Lewis through hundreds of interviews, archival documents, FBI files, and most of all the empathetic but honest sensibility of the author. 

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
With a novelist’s eye for the extraordinary, Hughes-Hallett conjures an entire bygone world: the masques, dances, art, food, and attitudes towards “effeminacy,” among other curious subjects, of Jacobean era England. At the center of it all is George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, who rose from humble beginnings to become the favorite—and lover—of King James I, as well as (in the words of his unreliable detractors) “a devil, a spotted monster, a comet that disrupted the natural order.” Hughes-Hallett sketches Villiers with obvious sympathy, and her portrait is stylish, vivid, and frequently surprising. This biography mixes sexual politics with passages on warfare and Westminster, making for an engagingly modern take on a dramatic period of history. 

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
Long after the death in 1961 of thirty-six-year-old psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, his theories of decolonization have shaped contemporary revolutions while fascinating and polarizing intellectuals and artists around the world. Biographer Adam Shatz has parlayed his lifelong interest in this “thinker of global significance” into a compelling biography of Fanon’s journey from Martinique to France and finally Algiers—a book that, as Shatz writes, is deeply tuned into the “gaps, silences, tensions, and contradictions” of this “nomad who never stopped looking for a home.”

The winner of the 2025 Plutarch Award for the Best Biographer of 2024 will be announced on Friday, June 6, at the annual BIO Conference in Washington, D.C. Information about the conference can be found here.