Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award offer West Midlands young writers an opportunity to win £2,000

Young writers from West Midlands have the opportunity to win a prize of £2,000 by entering a new essay competition created and judged by award-winning historical biographers and historians. 

Celebrated authors, Antonia Fraser and Flora Fraser, and fellow historical biographers and historians launch today (May 6) a new literary prize worth £2000 for younger writers: the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award. 

Entries will be appraised by the judges, all eminent historical biographers and historians, of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography (2003). The panel consists of Professor Roy Foster (Chair of Judges), Flora Fraser, Antonia Fraser (Elizabeth Longford’s daughter), Richard Davenport-Hines, and Professor Rana Mitter. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the Times Literary Supplement.

The Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award is open to writers in the UK and Ireland aged 35 and younger, and essays may be submitted from now until 30 September 2025 inclusive. The word limit is 3,000 or fewer, and the biographical subject, or subjects, should be historical figures of significance.

See elhb.uk/brieflives for more details about the Award, including eligibility.

Submissions for the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award, in pdf form, to be made to: brief.lives@elhb.uk

The Essay Award winner will be announced at an Elizabeth Longford Night of History at the National Portrait Gallery on 26 January 2026. This will incorporate a panel discussion by leading practitioners of historical biography followed by a reception. 

The Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award is sponsored, as is the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, by Peter Soros and Flora Fraser. They founded the Prize, worth £5000, in 2003 in affectionate memory of Flora’s grandmother, the distinguished biographer of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. Recent winners include books by Julian Jackson on de Gaulle, Jackie Wullschläger on Monet and Ramachandra Guha’s Rebels Against the Raj. 

Flora and Peter are now sponsoring the new Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award. It is intended to encourage a succinct but penetrating approach to historical biography, as pioneered by John Aubrey. Submissions for the Award should also embody the qualities of scholarship and strong narrative drive which distinguish Elizabeth Longford’s own work and that of former recipients of the ELHB Prize.

Chair of Judges, Professor Roy Foster, says: “The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography has fostered a greater appreciation of historical biography as a genre and of the significant role it plays in helping us understand both the past and the present.

“The Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award similarly seeks to reward younger writers who can offer new insights and bring historical figures vividly to life within a short compass.”

Flora Fraser says: “My grandmother was passionate about encouraging younger authors to write and explore the art of historical biography. We hope that this new award will motivate a new generation to research and write about the past with depth and imagination. We are very much looking forward to receiving and reading submissions.”