Alexander Masters with Lucy Hughes-Hallett – 23 January 2020 We are thrilled to announce that Alexander Masters  is this year’s winner of the Biographer’ Club Prize for an Exceptional Contribution to Biography. Alexander Masters’s prize-winning Stuart: A Life Backwards, is the story of Stuart Shorter, a homeless man living in Cambridge. This  brilliantly innovative biography created…

The 2019 Tony Lothian Prize has gone to Tom Seymour Evans for The Canyons – Six British Exiles, Los Angeles and the Counterculture. Seymour Evans received the £2,000 prize at the Biographers’ Club Christmas Party at Albany. The Tony Lothian Prize, sponsored by the Duchess of Buccleuch in memory of her mother Tony Lothian, is…

Tony Lothian Prize 2019 Our shortlist for the best proposal for an uncommissioned biography received in 2019 is just announced, and the prize will be awarded at the Biographers’ Club Christmas Party on Wednesday 4 December Emma Bielecki: The Lives of Vidocq – From King of Thieves to Prince of Policemen The improbable story of…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…