Biography: literary

Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been stories and epic poems from ancient times - Homer's Iliad and Odyssey recounted ancient Greece, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a chivalric roman...

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

'All Before Me' is a moving and absorbing account of the struggle to know oneself on the journey into adulthood, intertwined with the stories of the Wordsworth siblings at Dove Cottage. In the beautiful hamlet of Town End, where a cultural epoch was borne that would forever shape the way we exper...

Published to celebrate Katherine Mansfield's centenary, this is a compact but comprehensive new portrait of her life, work, relevance and wonderfully inspiring personality.

The definitive and revealing life story of the author of 'The Secret Garden', Ann Thwaite creates a sympathetic but balanced and eye-opening biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett who enchanted numerous generations of children.

When stories about Black women are limited, there's a tendency to platform the inspirational. Yet when it comes to finding kaleidoscopic stories for - and by - black women, they are few and far between. Through Kimberly's personal stories, the essays in black girl, no magic explore race, class, t...

A celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisa...

This is an exhilarating and untold account of a Florentine bookseller working at the frontiers of human knowledge, and the epochal shift from script to print that defined the Renaissance. The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings - the dazzling handiw...

A Byron biography like no other - published to mark the bicentennial of his death - it tells the remarkable life story of the celebrated Romantic poet through ten of his best, most resonant letters. Using Byron's correspondence, Stauffer relates a vivid and engaging story of creativity, fame, sex...