Hatchards and the Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce the launch of the 2025 Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize, the second year of Hatchards’ sponsorship of the Biographers’ Club celebrated Best First Biography 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 will be:
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.