Plutarch Award Nominees Announced

February 5th, 2016

A distinguished panel of judges made up of members of Biographers International Organization (BIO) has selected ten nominees for the 2015 Plutarch Award. The Plutarch is the only international literary award presented to biography, by biographers.

Following the announcement of the ten nominees, BIO’s Plutarch Committee will next narrow the list to four finalists. BIO members around the world will vote for the winning biography from among these four distinguished books, honoring a writer who has achieved distinction in the art of biography.

This year’s ten nominees, in alphabetical order by title, are:

• Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell (Viking)
• Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (Knopf)
• Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini (Doubleday)
• Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne Heller (New Harvest)
• Irrepressible: A Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage, by Betty Boyd Caroli (Simon & Schuster)
• The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon 1952-1961,
     by Irwin F. Gellman (Yale)
• Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, by Cathy Curtis (Oxford)
• Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)
• Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva,
      by Rosemary Sullivan (Harper)

BIO first presented the Plutarch Award in 2013. Previous winners, in chronological order, are:

• Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
• Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore
• Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.

You can find more information about the award and past nominees here.

The BIO Plutarch Award Committee members for 2016 are:

James Atlas
Douglas Brinkley, Chair
Catherine Clinton
Deirdre A. David
John Aloysius Farrell
Carla Kaplan
Eve LaPlante
J.W. Renders
Will Swift    

The winning biography will be announced at the 7th Annual BIO Conference on Saturday, June 4, in Richmond, Virginia.

Lee’s Biography of Penelope Fitzgerald Wins Plutarch Award

July 9th, 2015

Among Lee’s other books is Biography: A Very Short Introduction.

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee won the Plutarch Award for best biography of 2014, as selected by members of Biographers International Organization. The winning book was announced at the Sixth Annual BIO Conference in Washington, DC.

• The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandria by Helen Rappaport
• The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 by Nigel Hamilton
• Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

Named after the ancient Greek biographer, the prize is the genre’s equivalent of the Oscar, in that BIO members chose the winner by secret ballot from nominees selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft. This year marked the third time BIO bestowed the award. Previous winners were Linda Leavell for Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore and Robert Caro for The Passage of Power.