However, as Andrew Lownie, founder of the Biographers’ Club network of writers, points out: “Biography has become harder to sell unless a household name is involved.” It’s no coincidence that books on Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Churchill – with 45 books connected to his life currently on sale – Hitler, Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath and Agatha Christie are published regularly. Seymour’s practice is grounded in painstaking research and eyewitness accounts, written with all the tautness of a thriller, bringing to life this important, neglected writer.

But shouldn’t that be the goal of all biographers? Miranda Seymour’s life of Jean Rhys, featuring at this year’s festival, borrows Boswell’s cradle-to-grave template of literary biography. Biographers often disappoint by failing to explain the subject’s core achievement – and the very reason they are being written about in the first place – through critical analysis.īoswell’s own, brilliant The Life of Samuel Johnson was published 232 years ago this month and has never been out of print – meaning that he has been trumped, if not eclipsed in the public mind, by his subject. Ultimately, though, their work has to be judged on its own terms. Ideally, the written portrait will convey, through style and language, the voice of the subject as though they are talking to you from the page. An admiration for a writer instinctively makes readers curious about them. We love to catch a glimpse of the lives of others, and literary lives are no exception. I immediately determined to launch a book festival of biography. His exquisite neoclassical mausoleum stood derelict, with not even a sign to mark his last resting place. Visiting Boswell’s burial place for the first time, in the churchyard in Auchinleck, a former mining village in Ayrshire, I was shocked to discover that Boswell’s literary legacy had also seemingly been laid to rest. It was then still housed in the family’s London mansion in Albemarle Street, where one of the great lost memoirs in literature, Lord Byron’s, had been burnt in the drawing-room grate. It is a passion I have carried into adulthood: before moving to the great biographer and diarist James Boswell’s home county of Ayrshire and founding a festival in his name, I had enjoyed commissioning biography, memoir and travel writing – all genres at which Boswell excelled – as a senior editor at the renowned publisher John Murray. M y love affair with biography began aged nine, when my subscription book club sent me a compendium of “true life” adventure stories.

Wayward lives book