<img src="https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&amp;c2=6035250&amp;cv=2.0&amp;cj=1&amp;cs_ucfr=0&amp;comscorekw=Biography+books%2CBooks%2CCulture%2CPublishing%2CWikipedia%2CWilliam+Shakespeare%2CCharles+Dickens"> Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Kipper
Biography blandness ... a traditional kipper. Photograph: Alamy
Biography blandness ... a traditional kipper. Photograph: Alamy

Should traditional biography be buried alongside Shakespeare's breakfast?

This article is more than 11 years old
A major conference of writers and academics is to discuss how biography should evolve in the age of the internet and Wikipedia

Leading authors including Shelley and Coleridge's biographer Richard Holmes and Claire Tomalin, recent chronicler of the life of Charles Dickens, are set to gather this weekend to debate whether the internet and the rise of Wikipedia have caused a crisis in modern biography.

A major conference at the University of East Anglia gathers biographers and academics from around the world to discuss the future of biography, and if the traditional, cradle-to-grave narrative is dying out. The debate comes as biography sales have slumped significantly in recent years, from a high of over 7.3m sold in 2006 to just 2.7m in 2012, according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. The market overall has declined over the period, but Nielsen said that biography and autobiography sales have fallen "far more sharply". The autobiography category has done better than biography, it added, with the latter representing over 40% of the sector in 2001, and less than 30% by 2012.

"Can biography evolve to meet our current demands? Has the internet killed off the demand for the authoritative? In an age of bestselling celebrity memoir, does anyone still care what Shakespeare had for breakfast?" asked conference organiser Kathryn Holeywell, a postgraduate student at the university.

"There's a big anxiety among biographers these days – the Wikipedia anxiety," said Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at UEA and author of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot: the Last Victorian. "The worry is that, if you can get all that information from Wikipedia, what's left for biography?"

Holeywell believes there has been a shift in biography away from traditional "life" narratives to what she is calling "partial lives", stories that look at a group, a particular event or an age. In recent years, the UK's major non-fiction prize, the Samuel Johnson award, has gone to a range of innovative, sideways takes on biography rather than cradle-to-grave narratives. Last year's winner Wade Davis's Into the Silence looked at George Mallory's attempts to scale Everest, while previous successes include Philip Hoare's "biography" of the whale, Leviathan, and James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

The last "traditional" biography to win the award was Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan Coe's take on the life of BS Johnson in 2005, while the Costa biography prize was won this year by a graphic novel, Mary and Bryan Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, and in 2010 by Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, which tells the story of his family through a collection of miniature statues.

Conference attendees in Norwich, who will include Margaretta Jolly, Charles Nicholl, Miranda Seymour, Jeremy Treglown, and Frances Wilson, are to consider topics including, "what kind of life do we get when depth overshadows breadth?" and how "shorter, closer cuts stand up to definitive, cradle-to-grave lives", as well as how the serious biography is changing and adapting to the modern age.

"What seems to be happening is that biographies are having to do something different. Being a chronicler of a life is no longer enough – fleshing out a timeline just won't do," said Hughes. "It is all about added value, and it is quite liberating. I feel I don't have to get all that quotidian detail in – instead I have to find something that nobody else can find, through years in the archive, months of ferreting out.

"What I'm hoping is that what will be left is the good biographies. I think it will make everyone get cleverer and sharper and more inventive, and that has to be good. At the bottom level, biography has got that slightly ploddy, unimaginative way of doing things, and if that goes, and I think it's going – that is great."

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed