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 of the Biographers’ Club celebrated Best First Biography prize.
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, who has worked at Hatchards bookshop for over five years and is currently the manager of customer services and client relationships. He 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.
Submissions for the 2024 prize
Deadline
31st October 2024
Fee
The fee of £25 per title, payable by cheque or by bank transfer (see below)
Location
The 2024 Prize will be awarded in March 2025 a party at Hatchards, Piccadilly.
Requirements for 2024
Publishers must arrange for the short-listed authors to be at the prize-giving party if at all possible; if not, a statement/video link to be provided.
Books must have a publication date between 1st January 2024 and 31st December 2024
The author must be resident in the UK
If paying by bank transfer, please contact Prize Administrator Ariane Bankes for bank details at: [email protected]. Cheques should be made out to The Biographers’ Club and enclosed with submissions.
Three copies of each title should be submitted no later than 31st October 2024
(please enclose press release to confirm publication date) along with an entry form (see below) and entry fee of £25 per title.
Books to be sent by post (not courier) to Jane Mays, 21 Marsden Street, London NW5 3HE
Only entries submitted by publishers will be accepted for consideration. Literary memoirs are also eligible, but the following genres are NOT eligible: celebrity autobiographies and ghostwritten books.
Hatchards Best First Biography: the shortlist
Hatchards and the Biographers’ Club have announced the shortlist for the Hatchards Best First Biography Prize 2024.
Ashley John-Baptiste, Looked After: A Childhood in Care (Hodder)
A story of inner resilience that enabled the author to survive and flourish after a turbulent childhood.
Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell, These Heavy Black Bones (Canongate)
The first Black woman ever to swim for Great Britain tells the story of her sporting career and of how she walked away from it all.
Catherine Coldstream, Cloistered: My Years As a Nun (Chatto)
Catherine Coldstream found strength and meaning in the ancient ways of life to which the tight-knit community of women at Akenside Priory were dedicated – yet behind closed doors, all was not as it seemed.
Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare (Canongate)
Lockdown, for Chloe Dalton, meant exchanging her city life for the countryside. She soon found herself the custodian of a newborn hare, whose survival became her responsibility.
Michael Nott, Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life (Faber)
Drawing on letters, diaries, interviews and on Gunn’s work, Michael Nott explores the intersection between artistry and lived experience.
Michael Sheridan, The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China (Headline Press)
Veteran foreign correspondent Michael Sheridan leads us deep into the politics of modern China by recording Xi’s journey to power – a journey that featured murder, corruption and scandal.
The judges are Tom Baily (Hatchards), Telegraph books editor Iona McLaren, and 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. They will announce the winner of the £2,500 prize at a ceremony at Hatchards on Tuesday 4 March.
Hatchards has succeeded literary quarterly Slightly Foxed as sponsor of the prize, which was won last year by Daniel Finkelstein for Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad (William Collins).
Photo from left: Chloe Dalton, Ashley John-Baptiste, Michael Sheridan, Michael Nott, Catherine Coldstream. Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell was away.