Broad and Cargill-Martin among Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize shortlist 

Books by Leah Broad, Honor Cargill-Martin, Daniel Finkelstein, Aasmah Mir and Emmett de Monterey have been shortlisted for the £2,500 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023. 

Broad is shortlisted for Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World (Faber), a group biography which tells the story of four female composers, while Cargill-Martin’s Messalina: The Life and Times of Rome’s Most Scandalous Empress (Head of Zeus), which follows the emperor’s wife “beyond the salacious anecdotes”, is also up for the prize. 

Finkelstein’s “deeply personal, moving” memoir Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins), Mir’s “bittersweet” A Pebble in the Throat: Growing Up Between Two Continents (Headline) and Monterey’s “vivid, affecting” Go the Way Your Blood Beats (Viking) join them on the shortlist. 

This is the 10th year that Slightly Foxed, the literary quarterly and independent publisher, has sponsored the prize, run with The Biographers’ Club. Previous winners include Katherine Rundell for Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022, Faber & Faber) and Osman Yousefzada for The Go-Between (2022, Canongate Books). 

The prize will be announced on 19th March 2024 at Maggs Bros, Bedford Square, London. 

The judges are Philip Eade, Sue Gaisford and Clare Mulley.