We asked Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn to put together a concise round-up of notable biographies of 2024, comprising the winners of relevant literary awards from the United Kingdom and the United States. The list includes two biographies of married couples and an "unclassifiable" literary detective story tracking down details of a forgotten Egyptian poet.
Biography is a sprawling genre, which can be difficult for the lay person to keep track of. Those who love historical biographies are not necessarily interested in, say, philosophical biographies or sporting biographies, and these books might not even be displayed in the same area of a bookshop—rather being distributed on the shelves relating to their subjects’ areas of expertise. Nevertheless, heavyweight new biographies do attract a good amount of media coverage—and the best of the genre are highlighted by high profile literary prizes. Here we’ve put together a list of the biographies that won big in 2024.
The 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
The Pulitzer Prize for Biography, for example, is announced every May. This year, two biographies were awarded Pulitzers. They were King: A Life by Jonathan Eig, and Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo.
King: A Life is a new biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.—billed as the “definitive” biography—by the author of a bestselling 2018 biography of Muhammed Ali. King grew of that previous work, as many of his sources knew both men, says Eig; this new book was written with an intention of creating a true intimacy with his subject. “A biography can make you feel like you’re getting to know the person,” he explained in an interview. “I wanted to write a book that would make you cry at the end when you lose this person that you loved.” Despite extensive previous coverage and several previous biographies, Eig uncovered unseen archive material and revelations that Alex Haley (the journalist who co-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X) fabricated quotes in a high profile interview.
Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife tells the incredible life stories of Ellen and William Craft, a married Black couple who escaped slavery in 1848 and disguised themselves as a disabled white man (Ellen) and his manservant (William). Together they fled Georgia for the North, became celebrities within the abolitionist movement but were later forced to flee the country after the imposition of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 left them vulnerable to kidnap by slave hunters. Master Slave Husband Wife is, the author reflected, full of “nailbiting” moments. “That’s the thing about the story of the Crafts. Even if you know the outcome, it’s incredibly suspenseful because of how the Crafts take ownership of seemingly impossible situations.”
The 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
A different married couple forms the focus of the book that won at March’s National Book Critics Circle awards: Jonny Steinberg’s account of the lives of Winnie and Nelson Mandela. It is, as Richard Stengel wrote in The Guardian, “a beautiful and sad portrait” of a “marriage of opposites” at the heart of the Black South African struggle. Winnie and Nelson “is more than a joint biography”: it’s a “deft and operatic interweaving of two outsized characters.” In Steinberg’s telling, “the pair are like twin planets that exert immense gravitational forces on each other.” They can pull each other off course: “Winnie was Nelson’s kryptonite; for her, he scrambled his moral compass and did things that were deeply out of character.” The author achieves incredible access to the inner workings of their relationship, thanks in part to the detailed transcripts prison guards took during Winnie’s visits to Nelson while he was imprisoned. That they exist at all offers some insight into the inhumanity of apartheid; the incredible cruelty suffered by Winnie and Nelson Mandela during their lives, drawn together in this impressive biography, offers yet more evidence.
The 2024 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography
In June, the FT‘s chief art critic Jackie Wullshläger won the 2024 Elizabeth Longford Prize, a £5,000 British literary award now in its 21st year, for Monet: The Restless Vision. Wullshläger’s biography is the first full account of the great Impressionist’s tempestuous private life—and how these dynamics played out in his art: he was “wild,” he once wrote, “with the need to put down what I experience.” For all his contemporary ubiquity—find his famous water lilies on fridge magnets, tea towels, posters—”Monet was essentially ignored after his death,” noted reviewer Hugh Eakin in the New York Times. “For decades, his wildly abstract late work went unsold.” Only towards the end of the 20th century “did Monet begin to be rediscovered as the ur-modernist we know today.” Wullshläger’s “lively” biography, based on “meticulous” research does much to illuminate a much-shrouded life of turbulence and workhorse ambition.
The 2024 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
The winners of Britain’s oldest literary awards (alongside the Hawthorndon Prize) were announced in May. This year, for the first time, there were two winners of the biography prize. The first, Traces of Enayat, by Iman Mersal (translated into English by Robin Moger) is an intriguingly uncategorisable book—equal parts biography, memoir, and speculation—that artfully and movingly portrays the life of Enayat al-Zayyat, a largely forgotten Egyptian writer who died by suicide in 1963. “To trace someone,” Mersal writes, “is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.” Despite great efforts, ultimate Mersal experiences “despair” over the impossibility of understanding the truth of al-Zayyat’s life. These “remnants,” explains the New Yorker, are “embroidered” with photographs and personal reflections, “leaving behind a seductive mystery.”
The joint winner was veteran critic Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, a study of the life of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The book also won the Royal Society of Literature’s prestigious Ondaatje Prize, for its evocation of post-war Germany. The author Francis Spufford, one of the Ondaatje Prize judges, said that Penman “captures not only scenes both gross and beautiful from the 1970s life of the workaholic Fassbinder, but a glittering array of thoughts and moments from his own long fascination with Fassbinder’s place and time and historical moment.” Jan Carson, another judge, said: “It’s biography. It’s philosophy. It’s critique. It’s flighty enough to read like fiction and yet it’s one of the most grounded books I’ve read in years. Yes, it’s about German cinema, but German cinema’s simply the mirror Penman’s holding up to force his readers to look long and hard at themselves.”
Hopefully there’s a book that jumps out at you from among these prize-winning biographies. Have we missed anything? Let us know by getting in touch on social media.
November 6, 2024
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Cal Flyn is a writer, journalist, and the deputy editor of Five Books. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, her nonfiction book about how nature rebounds in abandoned places, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She writes regular round-ups of the most notable new fiction, which can be found here. Her Five Books interviews with other authors are here.
Cal Flyn is a writer, journalist, and the deputy editor of Five Books. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, her nonfiction book about how nature rebounds in abandoned places, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She writes regular round-ups of the most notable new fiction, which can be found here. Her Five Books interviews with other authors are here.
