The Biographers’ Club announces Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize 2025 winner

David Warren has won the Biographers’ Club Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize for his proposal, Sir Ernest Satow: A Victorian Diplomat and the Birth of Modern Japan. 

The prize awards £2,000 to the best proposal for an uncommissioned first biography, and is sponsored by the Duke of Buccleuch in memory of his late wife Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch.

The book is the first biography of British diplomat Sir Ernest Satow, an eyewitness to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which saw the end of Japan’s centuries of isolation. "These diaries vividly chart the often violent struggles that preceded Japan’s emergence as a world power," the synopsis says. "The author draws on his own experience as a British diplomat and ambassador to Japan to interpret Satow’s important but often cryptic life and work."

Also shortlisted were proposals, comprising Lizzie Broadbent’s Women Who Meant Business, Niamh Cullen’s The Informer’s Wife: An Irishwoman in the Italian Resistance, Elizabeth Schott’s Useful and Beautiful: The Life of Dorothy Wright Liebes, Bob Stein’s Mother and General: The Life and Legacy of Mary Ann Bickerdyke, and Sheila Weir’s She Shall Have Music.

Winners of the prize – including Francesca Wade, Sarah Watling and Harriet Baker – have all gone on to sign publishing deals.