Three years ago, a well-known literary agent told me that biography was on the way out. Sales were down, he said, and advances with them, and in the near future, he believed they would be written hardly at all. I remember flinching at this doom-laden announcement: I was about to start work on my own (group) biography. But I also felt in my marrow that he was wrong. And so it has proved. Not only is a younger generation reinventing the form (think of H Is for Hawk, in which Helen Macdonald combines memoir and nature writing with an account of the life of TH White). Even traditional biographies – the kind that begin at the beginning and end at the end – continue to be published and, in some cases, to rack up sales and prize nominations.
The new year will bring new biographies of, among many others, TS Eliot (by Robert Crawford, who will focus on the young poet; Jonathan Cape, February), Saul Bellow (by Zachary Leader; Jonathan Cape, May) and John le Carré (by Adam Sisman; Bloomsbury, October), though the one I’m looking forward to most is Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance, Daisy Hay’s book about the Victorian prime minister’s eccentric and surprisingly modern marriage (Bloomsbury, January). I also like the sound both of A Curious Friendship: The Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing by Anna Thomasson, an account of the unlikely relationship between the writer Edith Oliver and the artist Rex Whistler (Macmillan, March) and of Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske by Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape, April).
Cape publishes some of the most beautiful-looking books around and this account of the author’s quest to find out more about the beguiling Norfolk fisherman-turned-artist, considered an undiscovered genius by Sylvia Townsend Warner and others, is certain to be lovely to hold in the hand (it will come with lavish illustrations).
The historian Virginia Nicholson is steadily working her way through the female 20th century and I much look forward to Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s (Viking, March). Nicholson is a brilliant and tireless researcher; every page will be replete with both startling facts and intimately personal stories. Moving to more recent times, two books will deal with the troubled life of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen: Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano by Dana Thomas (Allen Lane, February), and Alexander McQueen by Andrew Wilson, previously the author of a gripping biography of Patricia Highsmith (Simon & Schuster, February).
Nature writing continues to be a major force – a readerly hunger that must be fed – and 2015 will bring us a new Robert Macfarlane: Landmarks (Hamish Hamilton, March), a book about the power of language to shape our sense of place. Urbanites, meanwhile, will be more than amply catered for by Iain Sinclair, who will publish London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line, a book that will no doubt make a neat companion to his now classic work of so-called psychogeography, London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (Hamish Hamilton, July). Hipster types, architecture nerds and fans of Jonathan Meades alike will want to bag themselves a copy of Raw Concrete: A Field Guide to British Brutalism by Barnabas Calder (William Heinemann, July). Jacqueline Yallop, previously the author of a good history of Victorian collecting, has written an interesting-sounding book called Dreamstreets: A Journey Through Britain’s Village Utopias – a history of the model village (Port Sunlight, New Lanark and others) as developed by Victorian philanthropists (Jonathan Cape, June).
Among the many memoirs that will be published in 2015 are Pour Me by AA Gill (W&N, July), an account of the year between the end of the critic’s marriage and the end of his drinking (Gill is 30 and in a treatment centre in the west of England when his book begins) and Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir, 1935 to 1975 by David Lodge, which promises to be a delightful wedge of social history (Harvill Secker, January). The so-called biblio-memoir was a feature of 2014 and February will bring a new addition to the genre in the form of Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer, in which Ann Morgan embarks on a quest to read a book from every country (Harvill Secker, February). In March, Hamish Hamilton will publish Visitants, a collection of travel writing by the ever-more-prolific Dave Eggers; it begins in Saudi Arabia, but also takes in Cuba, Syria and South Sudan.
Those of a nomadic bent may also enjoy On the Wilder Shores of Love: Sketches From a Bohemian Life (Virago, January). Edited by her goddaughter, Georgia de Chamberet, it collects for the first time a selection of Lesley Blanch’s journalism, travel writing and memoirs. Blanch, who died in 2007 at the age of 102, was an indefatigable traveller and literary celebrity whose wandering began when her husband left her for Jean Seberg.
Those in search of enlightenment in the matter of Isis will doubtless have a choice of titles in the year ahead. But Isis: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and JM Berger (William Collins, January) looks to be well-sourced. Its authors are also rightly emphatic that we must now alter our current concept of terrorism and they have suggestions as to how we should respond to such threats in future (to sum up: pretty fast). A little closer to home is The Italians by John Hooper (Allen Lane, January), Italy correspondent of the Economist and southern Europe editor of the Observer: a beady, stereotype-busting examination of the people and habits of a country now in unfathomably deep trouble. Finally, whether you love him or hate him, no one writes quite like Roger Lewis. His book Erotic Vagrancy (Quercus, June) is billed as half biography (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor comprise its dark heart) and half meditation (on the nature of stardom and Old Hollywood). Fans of Lewis will know that it’s guaranteed to be splenetic, funny, extremely camp and – just occasionally – soaringly elegiac.
