Biography: literary

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over four decades. To keep these relationships secret, he m...

Discover the lives and work of four ambitious Renaissance women who, against all odds, made themselves heard - and read - in the time of Shakespeare. In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen ...

Josie George lives in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands with her son. Since her early childhood, she has lived with the fluctuating and confusing challenge of disabling chronic illness. Her days are watchful and solitary, lived out in the same hundred or so metres around her home. ...

'Straight Acting' is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act str...

Throughout her life, Shelagh Delaney told the stories of unfamiliar lives: working-class women and men - often those peopling Britain's northern towns and cities - living on the margins of what polite society deemed acceptable, but who chose their own way in the world. She wrote the play, 'A Tast...

WINNER OF THE 2023 LOCUS AWARD FOR NON-FICTIONWINNER OF THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTIONFINALIST FOR THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST RELATED WORKSHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH FANTASY AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION'Always readable, illuminating and honest. It made me miss the r...

'Thom Gunn' is a landmark study of one of England and America's most innovative and revolutionary poets. Michael Nott chronicles Gunn's largely undocumented life: his childhood in Kent and London, his mother's suicide, and his mind-opening education at Cambridge, where he read Shakespeare and Joh...

Today, Ker-Seymer's photographs are known for who they represent, rather than the face behind the camera. This irony is underpinned by the misattribution of some of her most daring and innovative images, to Cecil Beaton. This biography restores Ker-Seymer to her rightful position as an artist at ...

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own - when she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shape...

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own - when she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shape...