2008  Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press)

2009  Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema (Picador)

2010  Michael Scammell, Koestler (Random House)

2011  Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown and Company)

2012  Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House)

Runner-Up:
Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (Riverhead Books/Penguin)

2013  Tom Reiss, The Black Count (Broadway Brooks)

Runner-Up:
Gordon Bowker, James Joyce (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2014  Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

2015  Anna Whitelock, The Queen’s Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth’s Court (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2016  Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson)

2017 Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of An American Visionary (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)