“Biography is an incredibly difficult thing to do well and quite easy to do badly,” says Kathryn Hughes, Guardian reviewer and professor emerita of life writing at the University of East Anglia. “It requires you to have all the research rigour of a scholar and all the lightness of touch of the best literary stylist.”
Author Katherine Rundell says writing Super-Infinite, her biography of John Donne which won the 2022 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, was “a very long process, and one that was not unspeckled with despair”. Rundell was glad, however, that she had chosen to write about her favourite author. “People always ask me, ‘Did you get tired of John Donne?’ And I genuinely, not for a single day, was tired of him,” she says. “I did get tired of myself, but that’s a very different thing.”
Rundell believes picking the right subject is the most important aspect of biography writing, but says that authors must also pay attention their literary craft. “Often we forget about the writerly quality of the biography. We think it can just be a litany of truths. But the biographies I love are written by writers who are interested in the process of writing as much as the process of history telling,” she says, adding that she would read Dickens and Austen biographer Claire Tomalin “if she wrote a biography of a footballer, which isn’t usually something that I would read”.
Hughes, too, is a great admirer of Tomalin’s work. “I recently reread her biography of Dickens, which is unfussy and deeply satisfying,” she says. Writing the kind of “cradle-to-grave” biography that Tomalin is known for is generally seen as “old-fashioned” now, “the sort of thing that hopelessly unimaginative and ploddy academics write”, Hughes explains. But “it actually requires enormous skill to keep the narrative pushing forward seamlessly while also allowing for fascinating detours,” she says. “Because it is so hard to do, people have sort of given up and now produce books that emphasise the fact that this is their ‘take’ on a subject rather than any attempt to offer something more substantial.”
While Hughes is looking forward to seeing this traditional biography style make a comeback – she “can see a few green shoots” of its return – she does also love formally inventive biographies, when they are inventive for a good reason. She enjoyed, for example, Jonathan Coe’s 2004 biography of the novelist BS Johnson, and the way in which its fragmented form imitates Johnson’s non-linear fiction.
There are so many ways to write a good biography, Hughes thinks, but all “require you to have thought very deeply about your subject”. You don’t need to tell a reader absolutely everything about them, she says, “but you do need to have understood them yourself.”
When Rundell wrote her first draft of Super-Infinite, she had certainly thought deeply about Donne – so deeply that she “made the mistake that a huge number of people who are writing their first biography make in a first draft,” she says. “Absolutely everything I knew about John Donne went into that draft, and it was about twice the length of the final book.”
Writing the second draft, she had to accept that just because she had spent three days working out a precise fact, it didn’t mean the insight was relevant. “Does it matter enough for somebody to clear space in their imagination for that fact?” she forced herself to ask instead. “Is it relevant enough to the story I am telling, or is it just a detail which will in the end drag us down?”
“Sufficient modesty” on the part of the biographer is very important, Hughes thinks: the story you are telling must always come first. She admits to a dislike of authors who insert themselves into the story and go “in search” of their subject. “I just want to shout at the biographer: ‘Honestly, you’re not that interesting – just go back to the archives until you find the real story.’”
Up close and personal …the biography section of a bookshop Photograph: Paul Doyle/Alamy
