Nonfiction Books » Best Biographies

New Biographies

Among the new biographies coming out in 2025, the lives of literary figures have been particularly prominent, including new books about Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish adventure writer, and Shakespeare's rival Christopher Marlowe, who was stabbed to death aged 29. Also popular are reconstructions of lives from the distant past that we know little about, including the first King of England and Fulvia, the first wife of Mark Antony.

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The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes

by William Kelleher Storey

The Colonialist is the first biography in decades of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and diamond magnate whose dream was to build a railway from Cape Town in South Africa all the way to Cairo in Egypt via British territory. With previous biographies boasting titles like Flawed Colossus, it is indeed high time for a reassessment of a man who, these days, is best known for having excrement thrown over his statue at the University of Cape Town in the 'Rhodes Must Fall' protest. The Financial Times described The Colonialist as a "fine new biography."

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Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome

by Jane Draycott

Male Roman writers, such as Cicero, were not kind about Fulvia (born 80 BCE), calling her "a woman as cruel as she is greedy." She married three powerful men, the last of whom was Mark Antony, who left her for Cleopatra before getting himself killed at Actium. It was one of many tragedies in Fulvia's life. In this biography, historian Jane Draycott painstakingly reconstructs the life of this elite woman of the Roman Republic and tries to separate the misogynistic stereotyping from the real woman.

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The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom

by David Woodman

The First King of England, by Cambridge historian David Woodman, tells the story of Æthelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, who unified the kingdoms that make up today's England after defeating the Viking kingdom of York in 927. There's not much of a contemporary narrative source about Æthelstan's life, so this book is a careful piecing together of other sources and evidence, making for a really interesting read about late 9th-, early 10th-century Britain.

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Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War

by Edda L. Fields-Black

🏆 Joint winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History

The extraordinary story of the Combahee River Raid, a Civil War-era mission behind Confederate lines led by the freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, during which two regiments of Black US Army soldiers torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 slaves. Written by a descendant of one of the participants and drawing from previously unexamined documents, this account offers remarkable insight into the only female-led military operation in the American Civil War.

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Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

by Jason Roberts

🏆 Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts is a dual biography of the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-1788), a French aristocrat and author of a 36-volume Natural History, as they sought to categorize the natural world. Although better known today, Linnaeus does not come out of the book looking good, and it was Buffon's ideas that led more directly to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection just under a century later.

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Augustus The Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco

by Tim Blanning

🏆 Winner of the 2025 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography

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“Augustus the Strong—and I think, if you took the exact translation, he was known as ‘Augustus the Physically Strong,’ which implied that brain power didn’t have much to do with it—was a man who fought first and thought second. He was a bit of a rascal and a warmonger, and a notable fornicator and adulterer who shocked many of his contemporaries. In terms of power politics, he was the Elector of Saxony who forced his way into becoming elected King of Poland, which was an absolute disaster for Poland and for him.” Read more...

The Best Historical Biography: The 2025 Elizabeth Longford Prize

Roy Foster, Historian

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Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin

by Sue Prideaux

🏆 Winner of the 2025 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

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“She goes right back, in a very conventional structure, to relate an extremely unconventional life: Gauguin’s revolutionary grandmother, his beautiful artist mother, his growing up in France, but feeling himself to be alienated from it, ‘a savage from Peru’. She shows the comedy of his nature and character, coupled with, often, the extraordinary sadness of the reversals and sufferings that he endured…It’s also beautifully illustrated. There are wonderful juxtapositions—of Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh with van Gogh’s portrait of Gauguin. There are intelligently, understatedly captioned, huge, luscious Gauguin paintings throughout the book. It’s a very pleasant, beautiful object to handle, to touch, as much as to look at.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize

Minoo Dinshaw, Biographer

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Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar

by Cynthia Carr

🏆 Winner of the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Prize for Biography

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“This is a compassionate portrait of Candy Darling, who lived a pretty tough life. She was born James Lawrence Slattery, but from the beginning it was very apparent that she wanted to become a woman, a very glamorous woman. So she left Queens and wound up in this group of people that flocked around Andy Warhol. Andy ended up using her in his films, and she became a movie star of sorts, although not the kind of movie star she really wanted to be. The hard part is that nobody really took care of her, including Warhol. She was often homeless.” Read more...

The Best Biographies: The 2025 NBCC Shortlist

Mary Ann Gwinn, Journalist

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Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

by Natalie Dykstra

Anyone who has visited Boston and is at all interested in art and museums will be aware of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, with its Venetian palace inner courtyard and extraordinary art collection, including works by Titian, Mantegna, Rembrandt, Vermeer (some, sadly, stolen in an art heist in 1990), Matisse, Whistler and Sargent. Fewer will have reflected on the life of the woman who created it. Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra is not the first biography of Mrs. Jack (as she was mainly known in her lifetime) but it's one that tries to give a sense of her inner life and how that played out vis-à-vis her art collecting. It's an excellent book because you learn a lot: about art and how it was collected, but also what life was like in the 19th and early 20th centuries for a very wealthy American woman/family. The book will also have you in tears at times, at the sheer scale of tragedy people had to live with before the advent of vaccines and antibiotics.

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Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan

by Ruby Lal

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“Gulbadan was the daughter of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, and the aunt of Akbar, sometimes called ‘the Great.’ Gulbadan was born in Kabul, ended up in Akbar’s harem in Agra, and eventually went on a trip to Saudi Arabia, to visit the holy places of Islam. Lal manages to recreate all this beautifully.” Read more...

Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024

Sophie Roell, Journalist

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Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair

by Maurice Samuels

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“One very readable book from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series is a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, the man at the centre of the Dreyfus Affair. It was a cause célèbre that rocked 19th-century France, but as historian Maurice Samuels points out in the introduction, not much attention has been paid to the life of the man most affected by it. If all you knew about Dreyfus was that he was a Jewish army officer who was wrongfully convicted of treason and imprisoned on Devil’s Island, this is a nice way to find out more (and if you’ve never heard of him at all, start with The Man on Devil’s Island or the historical thriller An Officer and a Spy).” Read more...

Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024

Sophie Roell, Journalist

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Monet: The Restless Vision

by Jackie Wullschläger

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“In June, the FT‘s chief art critic Jackie Wullshläger won the 2024 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, 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.” Read more...

Award-Winning Biographies of 2024

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

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King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

🏆 Joint winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

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“Eig enriches our understanding of King and rescues the civil rights leader from what he describes as ‘the gray mist of hagiography.’ He traces the arc of ‘Little Mike,’ son of a Georgia sharecropper, to national prominence as an eloquent advocate for Black rights, as well as a crusader against the Vietnam War and poverty, all the way to Memphis and the Lorraine Motel balcony. Building on more than 200 interviews and recently released FBI files, Eig made national news by debunking a famous quotation about Malcolm X attributed to King, tracks fissures in the civil rights movement, and reveals King’s womanizing.” Read more...

The Best Biographies of 2024: The National Book Critics Circle Shortlist

Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer

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Ramesses the Great: Egypt's King of Kings

by Toby Wilkinson

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“Other biographies out these past three months include Ramesses the Great by Toby Wilkinson, the Cambridge Egyptologist…Both rulers spent a lot of time and energy building their reputations, which may be why we’re reading about them three millennia…later” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023

Sophie Roell, Journalist

Interview by Five Books editors

September 28, 2025

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New Biographies

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