Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021 SHORTLIST We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2021 Prize:Windswept: Walking in the Footsteps of Remarkable Women by Annabel Abbs (Two Roads)Windswept takes an exhilarating journey from the author’s car-free childhood tramping the Welsh valleys to the remote journeys of extraordinary women who walked to find…

The Biographers’ Club is delighted to announce the winner of the 2021 £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize (sponsored by her daughter, Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch) for the best uncommissioned proposal by a first-time biographer. The judges, Lindsay Duguid, Dan Franklin and Catharine Morris, have awarded the 2021 prize to Sarah Harkness  for Alexander Macmillan, Advocate for…

Jane is delighted to be the recipient of an Antonia Fraser Award (October 2021), a grant for the purpose of research/writing a biography of a woman or women.  Her proposed subject is Lady Dorothy Mills (nee Walpole), an early 20th century traveller, writer and novelist and one of the first women Fellows of the Royal Geographic Society. …

NOVEMBER 25, 2021 Tony Lothian Prize 2021 Our shortlist for the best proposal for an uncommissioned biography received in 2021 is just announced, and the prize will be awarded at the Biographers’ Club Christmas party on Tuesday 8th December Helen Bain: Court Green – Sylvia Plath in Devon 1961-2 Here is an entirely new account of…

Two books heralded by the Tony Lothian Prize (TLP), given for a proposal for a debut biography, came out in July. Elaine Thornton won the Tony Lothian Prize in 2013, for her proposal for a biography of the family of the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Her book Giacomo Meyerbeer and his Family: Between Two Worlds…

Andrew Lownie, the Biographers’ Club’s founder and president, is persisting in his quest to gain access to the Broadlands archive, containing the diaries and correspondence of Lord and Lady Mountbatten, the subjects of his bestselling The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves. He writes: I have been fighting for 4 years to secure access to the…

We are excited to announce that The Biographers’ Club has become an associate of the independent bookseller John Sandoe. We feel it is so important to support independent booksellers and we hope to build a strong long-lasting relationship with John Sandoe bookseller. Through the John Sandoe website below you will be able to purchase some…

The Biographers’ Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021, worth £2,500, is generously sponsored by Slightly Foxed, The Real Reader’s Quarterly.  The Prize will be awarded to the best book by a first-time biographer, as chosen by our three judges. Susannah Clapp has been the theatre critic of The Observer since 1997, helped to…

Heather Clark Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Path The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath. Determined not to read Plath’s work as if her every act, from…

In 1945, Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys purchased Long Crichel House, an old rectory with no electricity and an inadequate water supply. In this improbable place the last English literary salon began. Quieter and less formal than the famed London literary salons, Long Crichel became an idiosyncratic experiment in communal living, and companionship…