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…

Katharine Campbell’s father Sholto Douglas was the hero of her childhood, an unconventional senior commander in the Royal Air Force, described as ‘a gloriously contentious character’. Following childhood abandonment and poverty, Sholto rose through the ranks of the fledgling RAF in the First World War before taking on a crucial role in the Second as…

Miranda Seymour has a request. ‘I’m completing a commissioned life of Jean Rhys and hoping to talk with biographers who can advise me on the best strategy when dealing with permissions. The Rhys estate are well disposed but I don’t want to commit any disastrous errors, having promised (crossing my fingers) only to paraphrase Rhys’s…

Jane’s next book  has been commissioned by The History Press.  It’s called Tangled Souls: Love, Obsession and Scandal  among the Victorian Aristocracy. Est. date of publication: Feb. 2022. Jane Dismore is a freelance writer of history and heritage and a biographer. She writes books and features and is a member of the Society of Authors, the Biographers’ Club,…