The best of new biography. We scrutinized the book shelves to bring you the best of the recent biographies. "There’s no rubric for what makes a great biography—they just provide a sense of what it means to be human." Elizabeth Taylor, the author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics' Circle biography committee
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell
***Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction***
“I’ve always loved a literary biography, but you don’t get quite so many of them now. It’s difficult, isn’t it, when you’re approaching the life of somebody? Almost always there’s been a previous biography, and it’s difficult to write one that really says something different and brings a new perspective. This one absolutely does and does so brilliantly. I love a book which then sends you on to other books. This is one where you think, ‘Right. I need to tackle John Donne’s poetry’…There’s a wonderful conclusion, where she’s saying why we should all read John Donne now. It’s about how death is always here and we have to confront it, but how doing so makes life absolutely fantastic. In a sense, that’s what his work was about. He was always living in the shadow of death, because of the times he lived in—the plague and the persecution of Catholics (he was born a Catholic). Later he was a man of the church. Death was ever present in those times. You don’t necessarily get life for very long, and you have to hold onto it.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Caroline Sanderson, Journalist
“This book is extraordinary because Rudolf Vrba and a fellow inmate, Alfred Wetzler, were the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. Jonathan Freedland is a fiction writer too—he writes thrillers under the name Sam Bourne—so there is an element of thriller in the way that he describes this escape and the build-up to it. It is incredibly heart-in-your-mouth compelling. But it’s a bigger story than just one man’s breakout. Vrba goes on to try and put the word out about what’s going on in Auschwitz and saves many lives in the process. The book is memorializing one man’s heroism.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Caroline Sanderson, Journalist
Spare
by Duke of Sussex & Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex
Spare by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex is one of the most talked about books to hit the shelves in January 2023. It's from the phrase 'an heir and a spare,' the idea that if you were a British aristocrat—and the inheritance of vast tracts of land was at stake—you needed two sons, just in case the eldest one died.
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
by Janice P. Nimura
✩ Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for biography
A dual biography of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, the United States' first female physicians and the founders of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, a hospital staffed entirely by women in antebellum America. Through the story of their lives, says the Wall Street Journal, we encounter "a rough-hewn, gaudy, carnival-barking America, with only the thinnest veneer of gentility overlaying cruelty and a simmering violence."
Pessoa: A Biography
by Richard Zenith
✩ Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for biography
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote prolifically throughout his life, but often under a series of assumed names and identities, which he called 'heteronyms.' Relatively unknown during his lifetime, he left a cache of more than 25,000 papers which are still being studied, translated and published almost a century after his death. Here, the renowned translator and Pessoa scholar offers an insight into Pessoa's teeming imagination and polyphonous genius by tracing the back stories of his alter egos, recasting them as projections of Pessoa's inner tensions—social, sexual, and political.
Mike Nichols: A Life
by Mark Harris
✩ Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography
✩ Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography
A New York Times-bestselling biography of the Hollywood director Mike Nichols, one of America's most prolific and versatile creative figures, by the author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back. Born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish family in 1930s Berlin, Nichols immigrated to the United States as a child, where his incredible drive saw him rise through the social ranks; by 35 he lived in a New York City penthouse overlooking Central Park, with a Rolls Royce, a string of Arabian horses, and a circle of friends that included Richard Burton and Jackie Kennedy. Mark Harris draws on interviews with more than 250 of Nichols' contemporaries to tells this story of a complicated man and his tumultuous career.
The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
by John Tresch
✩ Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography
✩ Nominated for the Edgar Award for best work of criticism or biography
John Tresch, a professor of history of art and science at the Warburg Institute, situates the iconic American author in an era "when the lines separating entertainment, speculation and scientific inquiry were blurred." The troubled horror writer embraced contradiction, exposing the hoaxes of contemporary scientific fraudsters even as he perpetuated his own.
Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
by Keisha N. Blain
✩ Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography
✩ Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for an outstanding biography or autobiography
The historian and best-selling author Keisha N. Blain examines the life and work of the Black activist Fannie Lou Hamer, positioning her as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks.
Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser
by Susan Bernofsky
✩ Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography
The first English-language biography of Robert Walser, one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century. In Clairvoyant of the Small, Susan Bernofsky—his award-winning translator—offers a diligently researched and delicately written account of his life and work, setting him in the context of 20th century European history and modernist literature.
Queen of Our Times: The Life of Elizabeth II
by Robert Hardman
The Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, has been on the throne for 70 years, making her the world's longest-reigning monarch other than Louis XIV of France (1643-1715: he came to the throne aged 4). Lots of events are taking place in the UK to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, including a number of new books about her life. We have an interview with royal biographer Robert Lacey on the best books about the Queen but it dates from a few years ago. Robert Hardman's Queen of Our Times came out this year and offers a detailed look at her life from birth. The book is readable, chatty almost, and a good corrective to anyone who has watched the Netflix drama The Crown, whose "questionable accuracy" Hardman points out.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
by Rebecca Donner
🏆 Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for biography
🏆 Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for biography
✩ Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography
The highly acclaimed biography of Mildred Harnack, an American doctoral student living in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, who became an important anti-Nazi activist and later a spy for Allied forces during the Second World War. Arrested by the Gestapo in Sweden, she was tried by a Nazi military court and finally executed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. In All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, Harnack's great-great-niece reconstructs her story in an astonishing work of nonfiction that draws together letters, intelligence documents and the testimony of survivors to create this remarkable story of moral courage.
“Reading This Much Is True is like hanging out with an aunt who’s had a little too much to drink and is letting it all hang out. I thought it was fantastic. At one point, she says, apropos of nothing, ‘I’ve always felt that smoked salmon was an essential ingredient of any social occasion. But it must, like a woman, be moist.'” Read more...
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs
Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi tells the story of the great Russian novelist's life by brilliantly intertwining it with his own words, taken from where Dostoevsky's fiction is drawn from his own lived experience. And it was quite some life: amongst other ups and downs, Dostoevsky was nearly executed and spent four years in a Siberian labour camp. You can read more in our interview with Alex Christofi on the best Fyodor Dostoevsky books.
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
by Timothy Brennan
Places of Mind is a biography of Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual who shot to prominence with his damning critique of how Westerners write about the East, Orientalism, in 1978. The biography is written by his student and friend Timothy Brennan.
The Van Gogh Sisters
by Willem-Jan Verlinden
We've heard much about the crucial role that Theo van Gogh played in the life of his brother, Vincent. But Vincent also had three sisters who were a big influence on him. In fact, it was an argument with his eldest sister, Anna, that was the reason he left the Netherlands. This is their story.
“This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included. As a result, we don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life but rather get to understand what really mattered.” Read more...
The Best Philosophy Books of 2021
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
by Amy Stanley
🏆 Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for the best biography
✩ Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by historian Amy Stanley opens at the turn of the 19th century, and tries to bring to life the world of a woman called Tsuneno, the daughter of a Buddhist priest who ends up working in Edo (modern Tokyo) and marrying a Samurai (unhappily). The writing is beautiful and evocative and it is rather wonderful to have early modern Japan recreated by a historian using novelistic techniques.
“Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo through the life of Tsuneno, daughter of a Buddhist priest in a rural province at a moment that Japan’s transformation is taking root. Stanley renders Tsuneno’s messy life, unique struggles and the quotidian particulars of her world so richly that that this Japanese woman from another era becomes achingly human and resonant.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
by Craig Brown
🏆 Winner of the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
Craig Brown's One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time is a quirky and interesting biography of the Fab Four, full of surprising information and interesting reflections on the 1960s, the Beatles' career trajectories and the joys and pitfalls of fame. Anything by Craig Brown is always worth reading.
Warhol
by Blake Gopnik
"One of the major points in my book is that he’s not at all the kind of holy fool or idiot savant that he still stands as in the popular imagination...He was a deeply sophisticated thinker about art, as much so as other high calibre thinkers like Donald Judd or Pablo Picasso." —Blake Gopnik
Our interview with Blake Gopnik on the Best Andy Warhol Books was published on March 5th, 2020
A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch
by Sanam Maher
A new book from the Karachi-based journalist Sanam Maher investigates the life and violent death of Qandeel Baloch, Pakistan's first social media star—and unlikely feminist icon. Maher draws from interviews and on-the-ground reporting in rural Pakistan, as she examines the carefully curated image Baloch chose to present to the world, and what the polarised response tells us about Pakistani society. The book has attracted praise from Fatima Bhutto, Olivia Sudjic and Molly Crabapple, among others.
We spoke to Sanam Maher, the author A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch, to find out more.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone
by Charles Moore
The final volume (of three) of Charles Moore's magisterial biography of the UK's first female prime minister. It features as one of the books included in our interview with Simon Heffer, journalist, historian and friend of Margaret Thatcher, on the best books on Margaret Thatcher.
Houdini: The Elusive American
by Adam Begley
His real name was Erik Weisz, but he will be forever remembered as Harry Houdini. Born in Budapest in 1874, he was the son of a rabbi who emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of four but experienced extreme poverty there. Houdini would go on to be probably the most famous escape artist/illusionist of all time. This biography by Adam Begley is highly recommended, part of Yale University Press's prizewinning Jewish Lives series.
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: the Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
by Donald Robertson
"How to Think Like a Roman Emperor is a philosophical biography of Marcus Aurelius, using key moments in the emperor’s life to introduce readers to the principles and practice of Stoicism, updated on the basis of the author’s experience as a cognitive behavioural therapist”—Massimo Pigliucci, Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York and practising Stoic, in his 2020 update on the best books on Stoicism.
“The Equivalents is magnificent social history, a collective snapshot of an overlooked moment in American feminism; we meet these women crossing the bridge between first and second wave feminism. The institute provided them with the rooms of their own to which Virginia Woolf had aspired, but it turned out they needed more of E M Forster’s edict to ‘only connect.'” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“Clark not only unearths new evidence about Plath’s life but also brings a fresh, subtle and nuanced critical perspective to her work. Plath is mythologised and pathologised; she has come to be seen as an icon or a victim, a “high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death,” as Clark writes. What Clark does here is recover Sylvia Plath as an aesthetically accomplished, important poet.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
***Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography***
“The Price of Peace is a biography of an eminent, visionary economist, the story of how John Meynard Keynes came to his revolutionary ideas, refined and advanced them through his life and how they came to dominate economic thought. One may think of Keynes as economist, but Keynesianism is much more than that—he has views on war, art, culture and a vision of fairness. Keynes had a dream of a fairer and more fulfilling life for all. Carter’s writing about economic theory is so lucid, so colourful, and such a pleasant surprise for me.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“Linda Taylor—a Cadillac-driving, fur-clad woman who scammed the system—was the poster person for welfare abuse. Levin’s stamina and creative search for evidence in this book is extraordinary, especially considering how elusive she was and how many identities she assumed.” Read more...
The Best of Biography: the 2020 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“Packer presents Holbrooke as a contradictory figure. While he craved approval by the elite, he also wanted to be a man of the people. He was enthralled with celebrity and money. Holbrooke’s social climbing and gross behavior are unseemly, yet Packer approaches him with such an empathic imagination, you just can’t help rooting for this deeply flawed man.” Read more...
The Best of Biography: the 2020 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
by Sonia Purcell
The untold, incredible true story of glamorous American Virginia Hall who infiltrated Occupied France for the SOE and became the Gestapo's most wanted Allied spy, by acclaimed biographer Sonia Purnell. The gripping audiobook is superbly narrated by Juliet Stevenson.
The perfect book for any fans of spy novels, biography or WWII military history.
“Miller sets out to reclaim Landon’s literary accomplishments and establish her as a bridge between Romanticism and Victorianism. Miller contends that Landon’s work has been overlooked and perhaps made invisible because she was regarded as popular writer whose feminine poetry was dismissed, and that she should be considered from a contemporary perspective as ‘proto-postmodern,’ sort of postmodernist in training.” Read more...
The Best of Biography: the 2020 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“If you wanted to understand why anthropology matters you couldn’t get a better book. He’s both gifted and careful….The person who actually knows stuff but doesn’t bore you to death. And that’s not as easy to find as you would like.” Read more...
The best books on Global Cultural Understanding: the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize
Patrick Wright, Historian
-
1
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
by Amy Stanley -
2
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
by Zachary D. Carter -
3
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne & Tamara Payne -
4
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark -
5
The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s
by Maggie Doherty
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor, the author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics’ Circle biography committee, discusses their 2021 shortlist for the title of the best biography—including a revelatory new book about the life of Malcolm X, a group biography of artists in the 1960s, and a book built from a cache of letters written in Japan’s shogun era.
-
1
Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
by Charles King -
2
The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
by Josh Levin -
3
L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "Female Byron"
by Lucasta Miller -
4
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
by George Packer -
5
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
by Sonia Purcell
The Best of Biography: the 2020 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
The Best of Biography: the 2020 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
How do you find the perfect subject for a biography? “Pick a real bitch, or real bastard, and make sure they’re dead,” a famous biographer once told Elizabeth Taylor. The author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics’ Circle biography committee talks us through the books that made their 2020 shortlist.
