Recent years

In recent years, multimedia biography has become more popular than traditional literary forms.
Along with documentary biographical films, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films
based on the lives of famous people. The popularity of these forms of biography have led to the
proliferation of TV channels dedicated to biography, including A&E, The Biography Channel,
and The History Channel.

CD-ROM and online biographies have also appeared. Unlike books and films, they often do not
tell a chronological narrative: instead they are archives of many discrete media elements related
to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Biography-Portraits
were created in 2001, by the German artist Ralph Ueltzhoeffer. Media scholar Lev Manovich
says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in
many ways.[12] General "life writing" techniques are a subject of scholarly study.[13]

In recent years, debates have arisen as to whether all biographies are fiction, especially when
authors are writing about figures from the past. President of Wolfson College at Oxford
University, Hermione Lee argues that all history is seen through a perspective that is the product
of our contemporary society and as a result biographical truths are constantly shifting. So the
history biographers write about will not be the way that it happened; it will be the way they
remembered it.[14] Debates have also arisen concerning the importance of space in life-writing.[15]

Daniel R. Meister in 2017 argues that:

Biography Studies is emerging as an independent discipline, especially in the

Netherlands. This Dutch School of biography is moving biography studies away from the
less scholarly life writing tradition and towards history by encouraging its practitioners to
utilize an approach adapted from microhistory.[16]

Biographical research

Biographical research is defined by Miller as a research method that collects and analyses a
person's whole life, or portion of a life, through the in-depth and unstructured interview, or
sometimes reinforced by semi-structured interview or personal documents.[17] It is a way of
viewing social life in procedural terms, rather than static terms. The information can come from
"oral history, personal narrative, biography and autobiography” or "diaries, letters, memoranda
and other materials".[18] The central aim of biographical research is to produce rich descriptions
of persons or "conceptualise structural types of actions", which means to "understand the action
logics or how persons and structures are interlinked".[19] This method can be used to understand
an individual's life within its social context or understand the cultural phenomena.

Critical issues

There are many largely unacknowledged pitfalls to writing good biographies, and these largely
concern the relation between firstly the individual and the context, and, secondly, the private and
public. Paul James writes:
“
The problems with such conventional biographies are manifold. Biographies usually
treat the public as a reflection of the private, with the private realm being assumed to
be foundational. This is strange given that biographies are most often written about
public people who project a persona. That is, for such subjects the dominant
passages of the presentation of themselves in everyday life are already formed by
what might be called a ‘self-biofication’ process.[20] ”
Book awards
Several countries offer an annual prize for writing a biography such as the:

 Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize – Canada

 National Biography Award – Australia
 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography – United States
 Whitbread Prize for Best Biography – United Kingdom
 J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography – United Kingdom
 Prix Goncourt de la Biographie – France

See also

 Biography portal
 Literature portal

 Historiography
 Historiography of science
 Historiography of the United Kingdom
 Historiography of the United States
 Legal biography
 Letter collection
 Psychobiography