Literary Biography

'What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.'A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend...

TWO LIVES tells the remarkable story of Seth's great uncle and aunt. His great uncle Shanti left India for medical school in Berlin in the 1930s and lodged with a...

After more than three years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch died in January 1999. Early that month she was taken to a home for...

Candia McWilliam had just joined the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2006 when she started to lose her sight. The gradual onset of blindness seemed...

From ND Stevenson, the New York Times bestselling author-illustrator of Nimona, comes a captivating, honest illustrated memoir that finds him turning an important corner in his creative journey-and inviting readers...

Focusing on the lives and work of five writers of the late-19th and early-20th century who are best remembered for their remarkable books for children, this is a study of...

M. Scott Peck was hailed as 'a prophet to the Seventies' when The Road Less Travelled was published. His book spent in excess of 10 years on the New York...

Dante is one of the towering figures of medieval European literature. Yet many riddles and questions about him persist. By re-reading Dante with an open mind, Barbara Reynolds makes remarkable...

"Locked in The Arms of a Crazy Life" is the acclaimed biography of Charles Bukowski, the hard-drinking barfly whose semi-autobiographical books about low-life America made him a cult figure across...

Arthur Miller's life spans more than four decades and includes three marriages - famously to America's enduring icon, Marilyn Monroe - numerous plays, novels and an autobiography. Martin Gottfried utilizes...

POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION refers to a form of navigation Gore Vidal resorted to as a first mate in the navy during World War II. As he says, 'As I...

"To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature." When Joe Orton (1933-1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was...

A best-selling author and world-renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries."The author brings a fresh hopefulness to the enterprise of books...

This is a memoir of the first 40 years of Gore Vidal's life, ranging back and forth across a rich history. He spent his childhood in Washington DC, in the...

This collection of sharply observed animal-themed tales is a delight, told with David Sedaris's trademark blend of hilarity and goodnaturedness. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in...

James Lees-Milne (1908-97) - known to friends as Jim - is remembered for his work for the National Trust, rescuing some of England's greatest architectural treasures, and for the vivid...

A poetic meditation on life and death, by one of the most renowned and respected film-makers and intellectuals of our time. In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was told that...

When Stephen Ambrose became interested in American history at age 18, there was much that America had done that made him proud, but there were many things he condemned as...

This is the story of an extraordinary boy with a brilliant mind, a heart of gold and a tortured soul.' From the day he was born, Nick Traina was his...

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian....

In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi wa Thiong'o paints a mesmerising portrait of a young boy's experiences in an African nation in flux. Beginning in the late 1930s,...

WINNER OF THE 2020 CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONChosen as one of Barack Obama's favourite books of 2019'A triumph...

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him.' Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on...

This biography is the culmination and distillation of 20 years' work on Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), the author who remains best known for "A Clockwork Orange", the source for Stanley Kubrick's...

Lessons in living from the bestselling and beloved author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGSA brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMAThe woman...

'This is a marvellous, endlessly illuminating book ... It doesn't go on the shelf alongside other critics; it goes on the shelf alongside Dickens' Howard Jacobson___________________Discover the tricks of a...

Anthony Trollope is, with Dickens, the most enduringly popular Victorian novelist. All of his 47 novels have been printed - two of which have been made into TV series, "The...

Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s New York. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world...

A continuous text made up of extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and a selection of her brother's poems. Dorothy Wordsworth kept her Journal 'because I shall give William pleasure by...

This is the never-before-told story of George Orwell's first wife, Eileen, a woman who shaped, supported, and even saved the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.In 1934,...

Maya Angelou's volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she...

Alastair Cooke's Letter from America: 1946-2004 is a defining collection from his legendary BBC Radio broadcasts that guides us through nearly sixty years of changing life in the United States....

'Hot damn! Let us rumble, keep going and don't slow down ... let's have a little fun ...'In his much-anticipated memoir, Hunter S. Thompson looks back on a long and...

George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in,...

The definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's finest poets, Siegfried Sassoon combines material from The Making of a War Poet and The Journey from the Trenches, the two...

Raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors, watching five beloved siblings sicken and die, haunted by unrequited love: Charlotte Bronte's life has all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic...

Laure Adler contacted Marguerite Duras in the 1970s after finding consolation from one of her novels after the death of her child, and they became friends. Years later, she became...

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenaged - son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America...

Written with a mixture of memoir and dramatic stories, this text is an exploration into what it means to be a wife, particularly a "good wife", then and now, looked...

John Keats died at an early age, leaving what have become some of the best-known English poems, such as "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to a Grecian Urn", "Ode to...

The 19th-century explorer Richard Burton was a blend of erudite scholar and daring adventurer. Fluent in 29 languages, he found it easy to pass himself off as a native, thereby...