PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography is awarded for excellence in the art of biography. This prize of $5,000 goes to the author of a distinguished work published in the United States during the previous calendar year. The winning title is considered by the judges to be a work of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.

All winners, finalists, and longlisters for this award are eligible to receive PEN America’s official emblems. If you are a publisher and interested in obtaining PEN America’s award emblem, please write to [email protected]. For more information, please visit our Awards FAQ page.

2024 Winner

For a biography of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.

Judges: David Blight, Ann McCutchan, James Traub

The Marriage Question: George Elliot’s Double Life, Clare Carlisle (Farrar Straus, and Giroux)

From the judges’ citation: “George Eliot was a far-reaching essayist and public philosopher before she became one of the greatest of all English novelists. In The Marriage Question, Clare Carlisle achieves a comparable amplitude, for her book about Eliot is equal parts biography, literary criticism, philosophy and intellectual history. Her great theme is Eliot’s astonishing gift for transmuting profound ideas—about the nature of human relationships, marriage above all—into characters and stories that feel thrillingly alive. Carlisle writes with great delicacy and insight both about Eliot’s relationship with her life partner, George Lewes, and about the movement of thought and feeling in the great novels and stories. “It is the fraught negotiation between self and world that shapes our lives,” she writes of Mill On The Floss, capturing both the terrible drama of the novel’s heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and the Romantic vision of human possibility that inspired Eliot, Lewes and the great thinkers of their day.”

2024 Finalists

The Marriage Question: George Elliot’s Double Life, Clare Carlisle (Farrar Straus, and Giroux)

King: A Life, Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Madonna: A Rebel Life, Mary Gabriel (LIttle, Brown)

Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite, Dean King (Scribner)

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, John Szwed (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

History

Eligibility

• A candidate’s biography must have been published by a trade publisher in the United States between January 1 and December 31 of the applicable calendar year.
• Eligible books must be written by a single, living author.
• Candidates need not be U.S. residents or citizens.
• Books must be works by an author about another person. Memoir and autobiography are ineligible, unless the work significantly focuses on the life of another person.
• If you submit a book for this award, you may not submit it for any additional PEN America Literary Award, with the exception of the PEN Open Book Award. Please note that the PEN/Faulkner Award is not considered a PEN America Literary Award.

Submission Guidelines

• All submitted books must be published by a trade or academic publisher between January 1 and December 31 in the applicable year. Self-published books are ineligible for the PEN America Literary Awards.
• Books with more than one original author are ineligible for the PEN America Literary Awards.
• PEN America will only accept submissions from publishers or literary agents. Authors may not submit their own books.
• On the submission form, please select the award you are submitting to.
• Submissions of a book to multiple awards is allowed only in the case of the PEN Open Book Award. Please complete a separate submission for this award if applicable.
• Please submit verified email addresses on the submission form. Your order cannot be processed without an email address. Additional contacts are required so that we may be in contact directly if an author or translator is selected as a longlister, finalist, and/or winner.
• Upload a PDF file of the galley or final manuscript on the book submissions form. Book award submissions will be read as PDF files. Please upload the file saved as BOOKTITLE_AUTHORNAME. For the judges’ convenience, please upload a book file WITHOUT watermarks. Each book file will be kept confidentially between the Literary Awards team and the awards judges. Please note that if a book is longlisted, PEN America may request a physical copy be sent to the judging panel.
• Upload a high-resolution book jacket photo. This may be used later if the book is longlisted, a finalist, or a winner.
• Each submission is $85. Submission fees are not refundable. Please note that all payments must be made via the submission form.
• Submission fees may be waived for publishers whose annual net sales are less than $2 million. You may request an exemption here—this form asks for a letter on company letterhead stating that the press’s annual net sales are less than $2 million. Do not submit your title before requesting your fee exemption, as the Literary Awards Team will provide you with an alternative submission method.
• Once the submitted book is received and reviewed for eligibility by PEN America, it will be passed along to the judges. Please add [email protected] to your address book, as it will be the main point of contact from PEN America.