Hatchards and the Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce the launch of the Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize, the first year of Hatchards’ sponsorship, following our highly successful partnership with Slightly Foxed.

The prize awards £2,500 to the best biography or memoir published that year, and has been won in recent years by Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar. 

The judges for 2024 will be:

Tom Baily has worked at Hatchards bookshop for over five years. He is manager of customer services and client relationships and is particularly interested in biography and memoir.

Iona McLaren, an author and literary critic who worked for eight years as books editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, and as deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph’s Saturday arts section, Review. She is now on the obituaries desk of The Daily Telegraph, and working on her second book. 

Sarah Watling, author of Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters, Four Lives in Seven Fragments and Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Rebels and the Spanish Civil War.