Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize 2025 is Launched!

The prize awards £2,000 to the best proposal for an uncommissioned first biography, and is generously sponsored by the Duke of Buccleuch in memory of his late wife Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch (1954-2023).

Judges 

• Lindsay Duguid– critic and former editor at the TLS
• Dan Franklin– former publisher at Jonathan Cape
• Catharine Morris – Associate Editor at the TLS

The 2024 Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize

Annual Deadline

Entry Fee: £20

Please download the Entry Form below and enclose it with your proposal and the fee of £20. If you wish to pay by bank draft please email [email protected] for Biographers’ Club bank details . 

• Proposals of no more than 20 pages (unbound, unstapled), including synopsis, 10-page sample chapter (double-spaced, numbered pages), CV and note on the market for the book and competing literature, by post to: Ariane Bankes, E6 Albany, Piccadilly, London W1J 0AR. Enquiries: 07985 920341
• You can apply by emailing [email protected] and we will send you the form that you need to fill in (sign and send by post with £20 fee and submission to the Prize Administrator at the above address).

Only the shortlisted entrants will be contacted

Entry Form

Past Winners

Many of the shortlisted writers (as well as winners, below) have gone on to find agents and publishers

2024 // Mark Naylor: The Popular Philosopher – A Life of Bryan Magee 

[PHOTO to come]

2023 // Andrew Kenrick: Juba – From Roman Slave to African King

2022 //Catherine Haig: An Unfinished Life – Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860–1945)

2021 //Sarah Harkness: Alexander Macmillan, Advocate for the Ignorant – The Life and Times of a Victorian Publisher (to be published by Macmillan)

2020 // Kate Crehan: But Will it Get a Laugh? The Life of Doris Hare in Three Acts (published by the Society for Theatre Research)

2019 // Tom Seymour Evans: The Canyons – Six British Exiles, Los Angeles and the Counterculture

2018 // Harriet Baker for Rural Hours: Interwar Female Writers, Landscape and Living

2017 // John Woolf for Queen Victoria’s Freaks – The Performers at Buckingham Palace (published in autumn 2018 by Michael O’Mara Books as Peerless Prodigies: Freaks, Circuses and the extraordinary World of P.T. Barnum)

2016 // Sarah Watling for Noble Savages (published by Jonathan Cape, May 2019)

2015 //Francesca Wade for Square Haunting (published by Faber, 2020) 

2014 // Polly Clark for Thank You So Much for Writing

2013 // Elaine Thornton for Amalia Beer: A Prussian-Jewish Life

2012 // Jane Willis for Marguerite, Byron and the Literary Factory

2011 // Jane Gordon-Cumming for The American Heiress and the Scottish Rake: The True Story of the Royal Baccarat Scandal

2010 // Matt Cox for White Lies, Black Magic: Prince Monolulu