Hatchards and The Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce the shortlist for the Hatchards First Biography Prize 2025
2025 SHORTLIST
Crick: A Mind in Motion – From DNA to the Brain by Matthew Cobb
Francis Crick was a restless, relentless thinker, as fascinated by Beat poetry and psychedelics as the genetic meaning of life and the inner workings of the brain. Yet for all his drive, he was galvanised by collaboration: with Jim Watson on DNA, with artists in Cambridge and California, and with his wife Odile, who drew the figure of the double helix that illuminated his most famous discovery. It was his debates and conflicts with these collaborators that powered a remarkable mind in motion.
Meticulously researched and shot through with insight and electrifying detail, Matthew Cobb reveals the man who changed our view of life forever. Crick is the first major biography of one of the twentieth century’s most exciting minds.
Operation Pimento by Adam Hart
On 14 August 1943 Adam Hart’s great-grandfather Frank Griffiths took off from a secret SOE airbase in rural England on a midnight mission codenamed Operation Pimento. Shot down near Annecy in south-east France, only Frank survived. Though seriously injured, Frank embarked on a perilous 1,200-mile,108-day escape across Europe, via the attic of a brothel, a Frenchwoman’s chimney and a Spanish prison cell.
Seventy-nine years later, Frank’s 22-year-old great-grandson Adam Hart retraced the epic journey through France, Switzerland and Spain on a mission to discover more about a man he’d never met, but always knew to be a hero.
John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie
A masterly chronicle of the greatest songwriting partnership in pop, Leslie’s dual biography of Lennon and McCartney focuses on their symbiotic relationship as well as the shared grief and hunger for connection they channelled into their songs. Ian Leslie traces the twists and turns of their relationship through the music it produced and offers rich insights into the nature of creativity, collaboration and human connection. Drawing on recently released footage and recordings, this is a startlingly fresh take on two of the greatest icons in music history.
Leslie’s majestic and wildly enjoyable biography makes us see and hear Lennon and McCartney anew.
Peacemaker: U Thant, The United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s by Thant Myint-U
In the early 1960s the still-young United Nations was regarded as the best hope for maintaining world peace. At the helm was Secretary-General U Thant, a practising Buddhist and former schoolteacher from Burma. Thant Myint-U traces his grandfather’s integral roles in resolving some of the era’s greatest crises, the war in Congo, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Six Day War among them. Drawing on newly declassified documents, he traces U Thant’s tireless efforts to bring peace to Vietnam, create a fairer international economy, safeguard the environment, and avoid a third world war.
Peacemaker is an extraordinary chronicle of a golden age of diplomacy – and vital to a deeper understanding of our world today.
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynne-Williams
In this honest, entertaining and at times shocking memoir, a former Facebook employee lifts the lid on the ruthless and absurd world of the new global tech elite and the enormous power they hold over us all. Sarah Wynn-Williams, a young diplomat from New Zealand, pitched for her dream job. She gets it, and rubs shoulders with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and world leaders, revealing what really goes on among the global elite – and the consequences this has for all of us. Shocking and darkly funny, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to the decisions that are shaping our world and the people who make them.
As all our lives are upended by technology and those who control it, Careless People will change how you see the world.
For the press release please click here
ABOUT THE PRIZE
The prize awards £2,500 to the best biography or memoir published that year, and has been won in recent years by Michael Nott, Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar.
The judges for 2025 are:
Tom Baily, who has worked at Hatchards bookshop for over five years and is currently the manager of customer services and client relationships. He is particularly interested in Biography and Memoir.
Michael Nott was a Fullbright fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and is author of Photopoetry 1845–2015 (Faber, 2018). He won the inaugural Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize 2024 for his second book Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life.
Francesca Wade is author of the widely acclaimed Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber, 2020), and has written for the LRB, TLS, Guardian, Paris Review and many other publications. Her new book Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is published in May 2025.
Submissions for the 2026 prize – Will open soon
Deadline
31st October 2026
Fee
The fee of £25 per title, payable by cheque or by bank transfer (see below)
Location
The 2026 Prize will be awarded in March 2027 a party at Hatchards, Piccadilly.
Requirements for 2025
Publishers must arrange for the short-listed authors to be at the prize-giving party if at all possible; if not, a statement/video link to be provided.
Books must have a publication date between 1st January 2026 and 31st December 2026
The author must be resident in the UK
If paying by bank transfer, please contact Prize Administrator Ariane Bankes for bank details at: [email protected]. Cheques should be made out to The Biographers’ Club and enclosed with submissions.
Three copies of each title should be submitted no later than 31st October 2026
(please enclose press release to confirm publication date) along with an entry form (see below) and entry fee of £25 per title.
Books to be sent by post (not courier) to Jane Mays, 21 Marsden Street, London NW5 3HE
Only entries submitted by publishers will be accepted for consideration. Literary memoirs are also eligible, but the following genres are NOT eligible: celebrity autobiographies and ghostwritten books.