My New Podcast “Biographers in Conversation” launches

I’m a biographer endlessly fascinated by the multiplicity of choices biographers make when crafting a life story.

When you read a biography, do you feel like you’re in the story living the biographical subject’s life, feeling what they’re feeling and seeing what they’re seeing? To stimulate your imagination this way, biographers make hundreds of decisions about how they research and write their books. It’s these choices I’ll explore with them in my new podcast, Biographers in Conversation.

In Biographers in Conversation I chat with biographers across the world about the multiplicity of choices they make while researching, writing and publishing life stories.

In each episode I explore elements of narrative strategy such as structure, use of fiction techniques, facts and truth, beginnings and endings and to what extent the writer interpreted the evidence rather than providing clues and leaving it to readers to do the interpreting themselves.

I also ask writers how they researched their books; how they balanced a subject’s public, personal and inner lives; and ethical issues such as privacy and revealing secrets.