The Biographers International Organization (BIO) recently announced that Dame Hermione Lee, Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Oxford, had won the 11th BIO Award. This prize is bestowed yearly by BIO to a distinguished colleague who has made a major contribution to the advancement of the art and craft of biography. 
 
One of the leading literary scholars and critics of our time, Lee is best known for her Virginia Woolf (1996), widely considered the definitive biography of that author. The book won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
 
Comfortable with literature from both sides of the Atlantic, Lee has written biographies of two American novelists, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, and also a critical study of Philip Roth. In addition, she has written a biography of the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and, most recently, of the British novelist, poet, essayist, and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life was the winner of the 2013 James Tait Black Prize and BIO’s 2015 Plutarch Award…[READ MORE]