Past Events
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Miranda Seymour – Winner of the Biographers’ Club Exceptional Contribution to Biography Prize 2025
Date: Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Venue: Maggs Bros, Bedford Square Time: 6:15 for 6:45 start Tickets: £12.50 from [email protected] We were delighted to give this year’s award to Miranda Seymour, author of a string of distinguished and original biographies, from her early A Ring of Conspirators about Henry James and his circle, through lives of Robert Graves, Mary Shelley and…
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Frances Wilson at Maggs
Frances Wilson (right), with Rachel Holmes chairing, gave a compelling talk at Maggs Bros about her biography Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark (Bloomsbury). The audience heard about, among other things, Spark’s ‘spookiness’ – ‘Everything that happened to her, she’d written about’; about the recurrence in her life and work of people with the…
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Save the date – Hatchards Best First Biography prize
Prize-giving on Thursday 5 March Hatchards Piccadilly.
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Christmas Party and Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize-Giving
Wednesday 10 December, 6.30pm to 8.30pm, at Albany, PiccadillyJoin us for drinks and nibbles at our Christmas party, and for the presentation of the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize, given for the best proposal by a first-time biographer. Tickets: £20 (members and guests). PLEASE PAY BY BANK TRANSFER OR THROUGH YOUR BRANCH. Book and get bank details…
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Frances Wilson and the enigma of Muriel Spark
Time: 6.30pm, Tuesday 11 NovemberAddress: Maggs Bros, Bedford Square Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark (Bloomsbury), about the early years of the great novelist Muriel Spark, can claim to be the most highly praised biography of 2025. ‘A brilliant, wonderfully shrewd biography’ (William Boyd); ‘Pitch-perfect, electrifying. Reconfirms Wilson’s pre-eminence as Maestra of British biography’ (Rachel Holmes); ‘Joyously,…
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The Biographers Club Summer Party!
Date and time: Tuesday 1st July, 6.30pm-8.30pmVenue: St Mary’s Rectory, Draycott Terrace, Chelsea, SW3 2BG Join us for drinks and canapés in the garden of St Mary’s, a Grade II-listed Catholic church in Chelsea. There is a marquee in case of rain. Tickets: £25 RSVP and apply for bank details (no cheques, please): [email protected]
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Francesca Wade, Adrian Clark at Hatchards
5th June, 6.30pmHatchards, 187 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LE Come and hear Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, in conversation with Adrian Clark, co-author of Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso. Francesca Wade is the author of the acclaimed Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the…
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Dr. Koop: The Many Lives of the Surgeon General
Weds, May 21st, from 6.30 p.m., at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street You are invited to join the launch of the first biography of Dr C Everett Koop, by Biographers’ Club member Nigel Cameron. Dr Koop was the world’s most famous paediatric surgeon before President Reagan made him US Surgeon General in…
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Booksellers’ Tales at Hatchards
Sarah Anderson and Martin LathamTuesday, 18 February, 6.30pmHatchards Piccadilly Sarah Anderson, founder of the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, explains how she set up the shop and how THE film changed things. Martin Latham, the longest-serving bookseller at Waterstones and author of The Bookseller’s Tale, takes us on a journey through comfort reads, street book…
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Sue Prideaux in conversation with Laura Hassan
The Biographers’ Club is very excited that Sue Prideaux will give a talk at Hatchards on Wednesday 19 March about her recent book Wild Thing – A Life of Paul Gauguin. She will be in conversation with Laura Hassan, her editor at Faber, and we will find out how a book comes into being –…