Prize-winning biographer, cultural historian and novelist
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s latest book is The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, published by Fourth Estate in the UK and HarperCollins in America. It has been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and has won the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Non-Fiction and the BIO Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2024.
Her previous books include The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio (2013) which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Political Book Awards Biography of the Year. In 2020 The Sunday Times called it ‘the biography of the decade’.
She is a respected critic and lecturer and she has judged a number of literary prizes. In 2021 she was chair of the judges of the International Booker Prize. In 2025 she is a judge of the Baillie Gifford Prize.
In 2025 she received the Biographers’ Club Award for an Exceptional Contribution to Biography.
