Literary Biography

Maya Angelou's five 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...

Maya Angelou's six 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...

Clinging to the Wreckage - the first part of John Mortimer's hilarious and moving autobiography'A true masterpiece of the genre' The TimesHere John Mortimer recounts his solitary childhood in the...

Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot was one of the most influential works for the post-World War II generation, has long been identified with the debilitated and impotent characters...

A deluded mother who invented her past, an alcoholic father who couldn't deal with the present, a son who wondered if this could really be his family. Richard Glover's favourite...

Alan Bennett's A Life Like Other People's is a poignant family memoir offering a portrait of his parents' marriage and recalling his Leeds childhood, Christmases with Grandma Peel, and the...

A Guardian Book of the YearAn Evening Standard Book of the YearAn Independent Book of the Year Netgalley's non-fiction Book of the YearA national treasure's journey to the brink and...

A The Times & Sunday Times Book of the Year'Fascinating... Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing' Sunday Times'Gripping... A story well told.' New York Times Book ReviewFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for...

Ireland's greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, was also perhaps the outstanding poet to have written in English since Wordsworth.Many of his early poems - wistful, mysterious and suffused with Pre-Raphaelite...

In Uncle Tungsten Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England. He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow...

The authoritative biography of Truman Capote, a bestseller when originally published on both sides of the Atlantic.

A Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns...

One May night in 1922, in a grand hotel in Paris, five of the greatest artists of the 20th century sat down to supper. It would be the only time...

*THE NO.3 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* 'Raw, compelling, wise and tender' Dolly Alderton'Motherwell is razor-sharp, fearless and wonderful' Adam Kay'Utterly candid and staggeringly good, both as the history of a woman...

Autobiographical and idiosyncratic, this is a collection of Alan Bennett's prose writings, assembled by Bennett himself from 25 years of diaries, reminiscences, broadcasting and reviews. It includes his address at...

This roman-a-clef is about a drunken young journalist. It is Hunter S. Thompson's only work of fiction.

He is perhaps the most acclaimed, revered and widely read writer of our time, and in this first volume of a planned trilogy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins to tell the...

In this award-winning biography, Brenda Maddox gives us a completely new view of D. H. Lawrence - not the bearded prophet with baleful eye, but a likeable Lawrence: hilarious mimic,...

Shelley And His World is the acclaimed biography by bestselling author Claire Tomalin'It is intensely alive, intelligent, responsive and informative at every point' London Review of Books'She writes from the...

'I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual. I make no apology for that, nor am I nervous that it will it make a jot of...

With an Introduction by Dr Angus Calder.The 22-year old James Boswell first met Johnson, who was then aged 54, in 1763. Nine years later he wrote in his journal of...

Autobiographical and idiosyncratic, this is a collection of Alan Bennett's prose writings, assembled by Bennett himself from over a quarter of a century of diaries, reminiscences, broadcasting and reviews. It...

Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all...

David Sedaris's remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this new...

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...

Bruce Chatwin's death in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end, since he burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia.Chatwin himself was...

'For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.'John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an...

THE EDGE OF LOVE is a beautiful, heart-rending account of the point in Dylan Thomas's life that he was torn between two women. His letters to the many women in...

Written in an even more vivid and direct style than her celebrated memoirs, Diana Athill's letters to the American poet Edward Field reveal a sharply intelligent woman with a brilliant...

Celebrated novelist Daphne Du Maurier and her sisters, eclipsed by her fame, are revealed in all their surprising complexity in this riveting new biography. The middle sister in a famous...

A brilliant memoir from the celebrated Chilean novelist on friends, family and life in California, her adopted home. Isabel Allende has sold more than 50 million copies of her books...

A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England's greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of...

In this wonderful addition to the Eminent Lives series, widely acclaimed biographer Brenda Maddox sheds a fascinating new light on the life of legendary novelist George Eliot. On 22 November...

The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my...

In this much anticipated addition to the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet...