News
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William Feaver on Lucian Freud
A packed audience at Magg Bros in Soho came to hear William Feaver in conversation with Michael Prodger about Feaver’s highly acclaimed The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth (Bloomsbury). Feaver revealed how he had progressed from what had originally been proposed as a slim, World of Art paperback and from his subject’s discouraging early reaction…
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Member Philip Williams self publishes a biography of his great great uncle, William Smith Williams
“The mysterious publisher William Smith Williams has always been the unsung hero of the Brontë Story. Not only did he discover Jane Eyre, he was Charlotte Brontë’s friend and supporter. In a fascinating book Smith Williams is at last brought to life thanks to the forensic skills of his great, great nephew.” Rebecca Fraser The…
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Do Not Miss- Hermione Lee, winner of our Exceptional Biography Prize 2018 who takes part in Writing Lives with Anthony Joseph, Lara Feigel and Delia Jarrett Macauley
The RSL is taking bookings from Members and Fellows below. For public tickets (£10/£8) click here. November 29, 2019 Of writing biography, Hermione Lee has said, ‘There is a tension between the muddle and repetition and fragmentariness of a life, and the desire of the biographer to turn it into story narrative.’ How does a biographer…
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Anne de Courcy publishes new book on Coco Chanel
Committee member Anne de Courcy’s Chanel’s Rivera: Life, Love and the Struggle for Survival on the Côted’Azur, 1930-1944, was published on 13 June, 2019. Featuring a sparkling cast of artists, writers and historical figures including Winston Churchill, Daisy Fellowes, Salvador Dalí, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Eileen Gray and Edith Wharton, with the enigmatic Coco…
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Brenda Maddox Dies Aged 87
We are sad to record the death of Brenda Maddox, one of our most distinguished biographers, who served on our Committee for a number of years. She was particularly noted for her biographies of James Joyce’s wife Nora, which won a clutch of awards and was adapted into a film, and that of D.H. Lawrence,…
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Sarah Watling makes her debut
TLP Winner’s Noble Savages launched Cape and Sarah Watling launched her debut biography Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters – Four Lives in Seven Fragments at Ink@84 bookshop in Highbury. Watling’s proposal for the book won the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize (TLP) in 2016. Watling offers a group portrait of four sisters who including Rupert Brooke, DH Lawrence…
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Daisy Dunn on the Plinys
Daisy Dunn on the Plinys Daisy Dunn has followed her acclaimed biography of Catullus with In the Shadow of Vesuvius (William Collins). She is pictured (left) with her publisher, Arabella Pike, at the launch of the book at the Panter & Hall gallery in Pall Mall. Daisy Dunn has followed her acclaimed biography of Catullus with In the Shadow…
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Club Member Jennifer Holmes published A Working Woman: The Remarkable Life of Ray Strachey
Member Jennifer Holmes publishes new book Matador has recently published A Working Woman: The Remarkable Life of Ray Strachey by Club Member Jennifer Holmes, whose proposal for the book was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize in 2015. A leading feminist (and writer) of the early 20th century, Ray Strachey was a close colleague of both Millicent Fawcett and Nancy…
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Henrietta Heald’s Magnificent Women
Club member Henrietta Heald, whose William Armstrong: Magician of the North was shortlisted for the Best First Biography Prize (then sponsored by HW Fisher) in 2011, has written Magnificent Women and Their Revolutionary Machines, due from Unbound on the 19th September. It is a portrait of the women, largely unrecognised, who were pioneering members of the Women’s Engineering…