The Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize awards £2,500 to the judges’ choice of the best first biography published each year. 

The 2024 judges:

Tom Baily has worked at Hatchards bookshop for over five years. He is manager of customer services and client relationships and 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

  • 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.

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

Recent Winners

2023 // Daniel Finkelstein, Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad  (William Collins)

2022 // Joint winner Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne  (Faber & Faber)

2022 //Joint winner Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds (Canongate Books)

2021 //Lea Ypi for Free: Coming of Age at the End of History  (Allen Lane)

2020 //Heather Clark for Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Jonathan Cape)

2019 // Jonathan Phillips for The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (Bodley Head) 

2018 // Bart van Es for The Cut Out Girl (Fig Tree)

2017 // Edmund Gordon for The Invention of Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus)

2016 // Hisham Matar for The Return – Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Viking)

2015 // Alan Cumming for Not My Father’s Son (Canongate)

2014 // Claudia Renton for Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power (HarperCollins)

2013 // Charles Moore for Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Volume One: Not for Turning (Allen Lane)

2012 // Thomas Penn for Winter King (Penguin)

2011 // Matthew Hollis for Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber)

Enter Below

Please read the requirements above carefully before entering.

Download Application Form

Hatchards & Biographers Club First Biography Prize