The Biographers’ Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize for 2023 will be awarded at a party at Maggs Bros, 48 Bedford Square, on Tuesday 19th March. Come and meet the shortlisted authors, and find out who has won.
Venue: Maggs Bros, 48 Bedford Square, WC1B 3DR
Time and date: 6.15pm for 6.30pm to 8pm, Tuesday 19th March
Price: £12.50. Contact [email protected] for payment details
The shortlist
Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World by Leah Broad (Faber)
A captivating group biography of four undervalued female composers.
Messalina: The Life and Times of Rome’s Most Scandalous Empress by Honor Cargill-Martin (Head of Zeus)
Portrays the Emperor Claudius’s third wife Messalina as very different from the murderous schemer familiar from Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein (William Collins)
From a leading political commentator, a powerful memoir of his family’s extraordinary fate at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviets.
A Pebble in the Throat: Growing up between Two Continents by Aasmah Mir (Headline)
This bittersweet memoir of growing up in Glasgow is interwoven with the story of the author’s mother, who journeyed from Pakistan to Scotland in the 1960s.
Go the Way Your Blood Beats by Emmett de Monterey (Viking)
When Emmett de Monterey is 18 months old, he is diagnosed with cerebral palsy. In this vivid, affecting memoir he faces with clear-eyed intensity what it is to live the only life you have, even when it falls short of expectations.
Judges: Philip Eade, Sue Gaisford, Clare Mulley.
This is the 10th year that Slightly Foxed – publishers of the literary journal Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly and an acclaimed list of limited-edition cloth-bound memoirs, and producers of the well-loved literary podcast – has sponsored the Prize, worth £2,500 to the winner.
Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize – the prize-giving and shortlist
