The Biographers International Organization revealed the shortlist for its Plutarch Award, given annually to an outstanding biography.
Nicholas Boggs made the shortlist for Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of novelist and essayist James Baldwin. The book won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for the best debut book in any genre, as well as the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
Howard W. French was named a finalist for The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, his book about Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. The book was also a finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Francesca Wade was shortlisted for Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, her biography of the modernist author, while Max Perry Mueller was named a finalist for Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West, about a 19th-century Native American leader. Graham Watson made the shortlist for The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life, his biography of the Victorian novelist.
The Plutarch Award, which comes with an honorarium of $3,000, was established in 2013. Previous winners include Robert Caro for The Passage of Power, Ruth Franklin for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, and Cynthia Carr for Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar.
The winner of this year’s award will be announced at the BIO Conference, taking place on May 28 and 29.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
