Hatchards and the Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce the launch of the 2025 Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize, the second 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 Michael Nott, Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar.
The judges for 2025 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.
Michael Nott was a Fullbright fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and is author of Photopoetry 1845–2015 (Faber, 2018). He won the inaugural Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize 2024 for his second book Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life.
Francesca Wade is author of the widely acclaimed Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber, 2020), and has written for the LRB, TLS, Guardian, Paris Review and many other publications. Her new book Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is published in May 2025.
Submissions for the 2025 prize
Deadline
31st October 2025
Fee
The fee of £25 per title, payable by cheque or by bank transfer (see below)
Location
The 2025 Prize will be awarded in March 2026 a party at Hatchards, Piccadilly.
Requirements for 2025
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 2025 and 31st December 2025
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 2025
(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.