Plutarch Award

The Plutarch Award, established in 2013, is an annual literary award for biographies presented by the Biographers International Organization. It is named in honor of Plutarch, the Greek historian who is credited as the father of biography.

Recipients

Plutarch Award winners and finalists

Year	Author(s)	Title	Result	Ref.
2013	Robert Caro	The Passage of Power	Winner	[1]
	Deirdre Bair	Saul Steinberg: A Biography	Nominee	[2][3]
	Lisa Cohen	All We Know: Three Lives	Nominee	[2][3]
	Timothy Egan	Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis	Nominee	[2][3]
	Alice Kessler-Harris	A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman	Nominee	[2][3]
	David Maraniss	Barack Obama: The Story	Nominee	[2][3]
	John Matteson	The Lives of Margaret Fuller	Nominee	[2][3]
	Tom Reiss	The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo	Nominee	[2][3]
	William Souder	On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson	Nominee	[2][3]
	Rachel L. Swarns	American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama	Nominee	[2][3]
2014	Linda Leavell	Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore	Winner	[4]
	Scott Anderson	Lawrence in Arabia	Nominee	[5]
	Marie Arana	Bolivar: American Liberator	Nominee	[5]
	A. Scott Berg	Wilson	Nominee	[5]
	Ben Bradlee Jr.	The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams	Nominee	[5]
	Leo Damrosch	Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World	Nominee	[5]
	Lucy Hughes-Hallett	Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War	Nominee	[5]
	Brian Jay Jones	Jim Henson: The Biography	Nominee	[5]
	Jill Lepore	Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin	Nominee	[5]
	Ray Monk	Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center	Nominee	[5]
2015	Hermione Lee	Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life	Winner	[6]
	Helen Rappaport	The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandria	Finalist	[6]
	Nigel Hamilton	The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942	Finalist	[6]
	John Lahr	Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh	Finalist	[6]
2016	Rosemary Sullivan	Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva	Winner
	Sonia Purnell	Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill	Nominee	[7]
	T. J. Stiles	Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America	Nominee	[7]
	Jay Parini	Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal	Nominee	[7]
	Anne Heller	Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times	Nominee	[7]
	Emily Bingham	Irrepressible: A Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham	Nominee	[7]
	Betty Boyd Caroli	Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage	Nominee	[7]
	Irwin F. Gellman	The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon 1952-1961	Nominee	[7]
	Cathy Curtis	Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter	Nominee	[7]
	Peter Guralnick	Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll	Nominee	[7]
2017	Ruth Franklin	Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life	Winner	[8]
	Frances Wilson	Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey	Finalist	[9]
	Volker Ullrich, trans. by Jefferson Chase	Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939	Finalist	[9]
	Louisa Thomas	Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams	Finalist	[9]
	Larry Tye	Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon	Nominee	[10]
	Alex Beam	The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship	Nominee	[10]
	Joseph Lelyveld	His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt	Nominee	[10]
	Ruth Scurr	John Aubrey, My Own Life	Nominee	[10]
	Reiner Stach, trans. by Shelley Frisch	Kafka: The Early Years	Nominee	[10]
	Simon Callow	Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band	Nominee	[10]
2018	Caroline Fraser	Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder	Winner
	Ron Chernow	Grant	Nominee	[11]
	Jonathan Eig	Ali: A Life	Nominee	[11]
	John Farrell	Richard Nixon: The Life	Nominee	[11]
	Andrzej Franaszek, trans. by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker	Milosz: A Biography	Nominee	[11]
	Francine Klagsbrun	Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel	Nominee	[11]
	Megan Marshall	Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast	Nominee	[11]
	Rosalind Rosenberg	Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray	Nominee	[11]
	Victor Sebestyen	Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror	Nominee	[11]
	William Taubman	Gorbachev: His Life and Times	Nominee	[11]
2019	David W. Blight	Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom	Winner
	Craig Brown	Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret	Nominee	[12]
	Julie Dobrow	After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet	Nominee	[12]
	Lindsey Hilsum	In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin	Nominee	[12]
	Victor Sebestyen	Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History	Nominee	[12]
	David Levering Lewis	The Improbable Wendell Wilkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and Conceived a New World Order	Nominee	[12]
	Patricia O'Toole	The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made	Nominee	[12]
	Andrew Roberts	Churchill: Walking with Destiny	Nominee	[12]
	Hilary Spurling	Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time	Nominee	[12]
	Jeffrey C. Stewart	The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke	Nominee	[12]
2020	Sonia Purnell	A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II	Winner	[13][14]
	Sidney Blumenthal	All the Powers of Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860	Finalist	[15]
	Jacquelyn Dowd Hall	Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America	Finalist	[15]
	Charles King	Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century	Finalist	[15]
	George Packer	Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century	Finalist	[15]
2021	A. N. Wilson	The Mystery of Charles Dickens	Winner	[16][17]
	Les Payne and Tamara Payne	The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X	Finalist	[18]
	Jonathan Alter	His Very Best: Jimmy Carter: A Life	Finalist	[18]
	Ted Widmer	Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington	Finalist	[18]
	Martha Ackmann	These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson	Finalist	[18]
	Steven Heyman	The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution	Longlist	[19]
	Hilary Holladay	The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography	Longlist	[19]
	David S. Reynolds	Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times	Longlist	[19]
	Steven C. Smith	Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood's Most Influential Composer	Longlist	[19]
	Volker Ullrich, trans. by Jefferson Chase	Hitler: Downfall 1939-1945	Longlist	[19]
2022	Frances Wilson	Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence	Winner	[20]
	Rebecca Donner	All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler	Shortlist	[21]
	Robert Elder	Calhoun: American Heretic	Shortlist	[21]
	Fiona Sampson	Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning	Shortlist	[21]
	Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan	Francis Bacon: Revelations	Shortlist	[21]
	Claude A. Clegg III	The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama	Longlist	[22]
	Janice P. Nimura	The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine	Longlist	[22]
	Matthew Sturgis	Oscar Wilde: A Life	Longlist	[22]
	Dorothy Wickenden	The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights	Longlist	[22]
	Richard Zenith	Pessoa: A Biography	Longlist	[22]
2023	Jennifer Homans	Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century	Winner	[23][24]
	Beverly Gage	G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century	Shortlist	[25]
	Jon Meacham	And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle	Shortlist	[25]
	Jane Ridley	George V: Never a Dull Moment	Shortlist	[25]
	Katherine Rundell	Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne	Shortlist	[25]
	Tomiko Brown-Nagin	Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality	Longlist	[26]
	John A. Farrell	Ted Kennedy: A Life	Longlist	[26]
	Paul Fisher	The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World	Longlist	[26]
	Stacy Schiff	The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams	Longlist	[26]
	Miranda Seymour	I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys	Longlist	[26]
2024	Yepoka Yeebo	Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World	Winner	[27][28]
	Jonathan Eig	King: A Life	Shortlist	[29]
	Howard Fishman	To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse	Shortlist	[29]
	Lisa M. Hamilton	The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival	Shortlist	[29]
	Prudence Peiffer	The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever	Shortlist	[29]
	Sally H. Jacobs	Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson	Nominee	[30]
	Larry Rohter	Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist	Nominee	[30]
	Barbara D. Savage	Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar	Nominee	[30]
	Willard Spiegelman	Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt	Nominee	[30]
	Jonny Steinberg	Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage	Nominee	[30]
2025	Max Boot	Reagan: His Life and Legend	Longlist	[31]
	Cynthia Carr	Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar	Longlist	[31]
	Margalit Fox	The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss	Longlist	[31]
	Stephanie Gorton	The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America	Longlist	[31]
	David Greenberg	John Lewis: A Life, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs for Survival Is A Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde	Longlist	[31]
	Lucy Hughes-Hallett	The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham	Longlist	[31]
	Heath Hardage Lee	The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady	Longlist	[31]
	Adam Shatz	The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon	Longlist	[31]
	Jackie Wullschläger	Monet: The Restless Vision	Longlist	[31]