In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Nicholas Boggs chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Baldwin: A Love Story.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Why Nicholas Boggs structured the biography around Baldwin’s four great loves rather than chronology.
• Baldwin’s frank acknowledgment that his novels were driven by autobiographical impulses gave Boggs rare biographical licence to connect fiction to life without making reductive one-to-one correlations between characters and real people.​
• Retracing Baldwin’s footsteps to Corsica, Istanbul and the south of France proved essential for capturing sensory details like the smell of maquis plants that connected biographer to subject across time.
• Boggs challenged the prevailing image of Baldwin as either a civil rights icon or a tragic figure, instead revealing he died at 63 surrounded by his great loves.
• The biography’s epilogue deliberately intervenes in Baldwin’s posthumous reputation, joining a chorus of scholars and writers working to dismantle the narrative of creative decline that attached itself to Baldwin’s later years, reorienting readers toward the enduring power of his voice and vision.​

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Francesca Wade chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife was sparked by Francesca’s access to previously unpublished Leon Katz interview transcripts with Alice B. Toklas, revealing how Gertrude Stein deliberately constructed her public persona and how Toklas spent 20 years stewarding Stein’s posthumous legacy as instructed by Stein’s will.
• Francesca challenges the conventional biographical form by structuring the narrative in two parts: first telling Stein’s life story as she presented it, then interrogating and deepening that account through posthumous archival discoveries, dramatising how biographical knowledge is constructed rather than simply discovered.
• Francesca deliberately exposes the archival ‘workings’ behind biography, showing how Yale archivist Donald Gallup’s negotiations with Toklas over burning love letters and sealing documents shaped what future generations could know about Stein’s life and her relationships.
• The central enigma Francesca explores is Stein’s binary reputation: celebrated as either a radical modernist writer or merely a personality symbolising 1920s Paris bohemia. This tension frustrated Stein in her lifetime and continues to complicate her literary legacy.
• Francesca concludes that biography is fundamentally an artificial and odd enterprise of converting life’s messiness into linear narrative, with every sentence representing a decision shaped by the biographer’s attitudes and biases. This makes biographical practice itself worthy of interrogation and experimentation

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation Lance Richardson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Lance Richardson approached the biography with a central thesis question: how did Matthiessen develop his unique sensibility that allowed him to move fluidly between science and spirituality, treating them as complementary rather than mutually incompatible worldviews?
• The biography’s unauthorised status liberated Richardson to tell the unvarnished truth without contractual obligations to polish Matthiessen’s legacy.
• Richardson’s methodology prioritised archival evidence over potentially fallible memories, deliberately presenting conflicting accounts from sources rather than reconciling them artificially, which he considers fiction and a biographical pitfall.
• How retracing Matthiessen’s trek to Nepal’s Crystal Monastery enabled Richardson to viscerally understand the elemental spaces where Matthiessen shed ego and responsibilities to access his most authentic self.
• Richardson deliberately avoided portraying Matthiessen as a unified self, instead showing how his fractured personas were all manifestations of the same restless search for meaning and true nature.
• The biography’s ethical framework prioritised truth-telling about Matthiessen’s serial infidelities and neglect while giving substantial narrative space to Maria Matthiessen and other women to speak in their own words, resisting the biographical tradition of relegating wives to background roles.
• The epilogue’s focus on Matthiessen’s Zen teachings about death and essential mind provided closure for a biography about a fundamentally unresolved life.