The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography is awarded for excellence in the art of biography. This prize of $5,000 will go to the author of a distinguished work published in the United States during the previous calendar year. The winning title should be a work of exceptional literary, narrative and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.The award was established by Rodman L. Drake.

2010 Judges: Helen Epstein, Elizabeth Frank, Jeffrey Meyers

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The 2010 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography went  to Michael Scammell for Koestler.

The judges wrote in their citation:

“Arthur Koestler was central European, Jewish and deracinated; cosmopolitan, hedonistic and unscrupulous with women; a demonic worker, heavy drinker and restless traveler; eager for experience and politically committed; racked by self-doubts and torn by despair. Permanently indignant, Koestler lived for ideas and was ready to die for them.

Michael Scammell has written a brilliant and intellectually impressive life that does full justice to the complex character of its polymath subject—a Renaissance man in his range of learning and overreaching ambition. He has done exhaustive research in Hungarian, German, Russian, French and Spanish sources; is excellent on the political and cultural background; provides brief but incisive analyses of the works; and tells the story in a brisk and lively narrative. He shows the importance of a fascinating personality and leading intellectual, who was at the center of all the political movements of his time and, with Darkness at Noon, changed the West’s idea of Russia.”

2010 Finalists:
Graham Farmelo for The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
Jonathan Bate for Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare