Biography: writers

On the same day that his wife gave birth to twins, Anthony Doerr received the Rome Prize, an award that gave him a year-long stipend and studio in Rome.

From China's first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature comes an exquisite book of fictions, none of which has ever been published before in English.

The award-winning author presents a provocative, thoroughly modern revisionist biographical history of one of America’s greatest and most influential families—the Roosevelts—exposing heretofore unknown family secrets and detailing complex family rivalries with his signature cinematic flair.

The one and only Fay Weldon tells the story of her turbulent and controversial life.

Disraeli is one of the most fascinating men of the 19th century.

A groundbreaking work of Romantic biography; David Crane's book is an astonishingly original examination of Byron, and a radical approach to biography.

Published to coincide with his major biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi's acclaimed critical appreciation of her work is reissued in a fully revised and updated edition, with a foreword by John Bayley.

Richard Holmes's great work of biographical exploration, published alongside its sister volume 'Sidetracks'.

A major biography of the man who, more than any other, made the twentieth century.

From one of England's greatest living writers comes a collection of exquisitely formed stories set in life's great playground.

The sequel to 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'.

An unbearably moving, intensely passionate, deeply personal account of life as seen through the eyes of one of America's best-loved novelists.

A collection of charming and celebrated writings about cats, from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A brilliant personal history from the award-winning author of 'The Corrections'.

The definitive critical study of Tolkien's greatest works by the respected and world renowned Tolkien scholar Professor T.

Scott Fitzgerald, a romantic and tragic figure who embodied the decades between the two world wars, was a writer who took his material almost entirely from his life.

By turns, an unsparing and joyous account of life in a postwar London rooming house by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.

'I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings.

This highly praised biography is the first to explore fully the way in which her painful early life and rejection by her brother Isaac in particular, shaped the insight and art which made her both Victorian England's last great visionary and the first modern.

An engaging, wickedly funny and splendidly anecdotal memoir of a career spent among writers, agents, publishers and bookmen and women of every stripe.

In this beautiful reissue, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical curiosities he discovered while researching the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.

Critically acclaimed, award-winning biography of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and the brilliant group of writers to come out of Oxford during the Second World War.

Shakespeare in Love for the sonnets: a fictional tale of how Shakespeare wrote his most famous poems.

A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist - and prolific correspondent - Penelope FitzgeraldAcclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels - including the Booker Prize-winning 'Offshore' - and superb biographies, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most admired authors in Britain during the last century.

This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C.

Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes's classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets.

Bestselling author Torey Hayden's novel poignantly tells of a daughter's attempt to grow up in the shadow of her mother's haunted past.

Elizabeth Smart's passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as 'Like MADAME BOVARY blasted by lightning .

A working father whose life no longer feels like his own discovers the transforming powers of great (and downright terrible) literature in this laugh-out-loud memoir.

From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960's, Lorna Sage vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished time and place and illuminates the lives of three generations of women.

The new novel from the bestselling author of THE SIXTH WIFE.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore' and 'The Blue Flower', turns her attention to the story of her remarkable family.

'Justine' was the Marquis de Sade's first novella, written in 1787, whilst imprisoned for two weeks in the Bastille.

'Lives that Never Grow Old' is a wonderful series- edited by Richard Holmes - that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography.

A biography of the Sufi poet that's "e;a dazzling feat of scholarship .

One woman's passion for books and search for romance lie at the heart of this touching and funny novel about literature and longing in Los Angeles.

Discover a novelist that Neil Gaiman describes as 'an astonishingly smart writer'.

Michael Chabon, author of WONDER BOYS and the Pulitzer Prize-wining THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, has written an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his novels.

One of the great hidden gems of the past decade.

A brilliant, highly spirited memoir of Sidney Sheldon's early life that provides as compulsively readable and racy a narrative as any of his bestselling novels.

Carefree, revelatory and intimate, this selection of unpublished letters between the six legendary Mitford sisters, compiled by Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law, is alive with wit, passion and heartbreak.

International bestseller Bill Bryson brings us this brilliantly readable biography of the world's greatest playwright, William Shakespeare.

Lives that Never Grow OldPart of a radical series -edited by Richard Holmes - that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography.

LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDThis unique series - edited by Richard Holmes - recovers the great classical tradition of English biography.

LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDPart of a radical series - edited by Richard Holmes - that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography.

From the author of the Orange New Writers shortlisted 'The Book of Fires', an extraordinary tale of love and science.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEEThe previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer - full of wit, feeling and illumination.

A page-turning, beautifully written novel from the critically-acclaimed author of Forgive Me, How to be Lost and Sleep Toward Heaven.

A bewitching debut novel in the vein of the much-loved classic Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe.

An impressive debut from a major new voice in American fiction.