Bumper year for biographies and memoirs as 2025 delivers a diverse slate of life stories

2025 has been a bumper year for biographies and memoirs, with publishers releasing a wide array of life stories that span journalism, cuisine, politics and literature. Graydon Carter’s When The Going Was Good revisits Vanity Fair’s New York heyday in the 1990s, recounting the magazine’s glamor and the era’s lavish perks for reporters while sparring with a rising political figure. Bee Wilson’s The Heart-Shaped Tin uses a kitchen artefact—a heart-shaped cake tin from her wedding—as a vehicle to explore memory, loss and the emotional resonance of everyday objects across cultures.

Humour and resilience also feature prominently: Not That I’m Bitter by Helen Lederer offers a candid, self-deprecating view of growing up in southeast London and navigating comedy’s male-dominated scene; Michael Morpurgo’s Funny Thing, Getting Older, And Other Reflections gathers essays and recollections that helped shape his classic children’s books and stage adaptations. A broader spectrum of voices appears in Nigel Slater’s A Thousand Feasts, which blends culinary reportage with intimate snapshots of a life spent cooking and writing, from a modest Midlands upbringing to international kitchens. Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark presents a penetrating portrait of Muriel Spark, examining the author’s private life and public genius through a biographer’s careful lens.

Across the roster of new releases, readers encounter a mix of fame, craft and personal reckoning that characterizes much of contemporary life-writing. Chris Bryant’s A Life And A Half traces a path from a repressed gay Anglican priest to a freely engaged Labour MP, weaving public service with intimate relationships and family dynamics. Rosie Schaap’s The Slow Road North follows a grieving writer who moves from Brooklyn to a small Northern Irish village to help nurture an integrated community and heal in the wake of personal loss. Inside Boris Becker chronicles the meteoric rise and subsequent downfall of the Wimbledon icon, including the strain of legal and financial troubles that culminated in a prison sentence. Melvyn Downes’s Unbreakable documents a demanding journey through SAS selection, warlike environments and the strain of proving oneself under pressure. Tart Slutty Cheff offers a high-energy kitchen memoir that blends culinary craft with candid explorations of sexuality and identity, while Fiona Phillips’s Remember When recounts a dementia diagnosis and the impact on family, career and memory. Bill Gates’s Source Code reflects on formative influences, the origins of Microsoft and the early friendships that shaped a pioneering tech empire. Evie Sage’s Me, You, Them follows a couple negotiating fertility with a bold openness that leads them into new relationship dynamics, and Lili Myers’s Dave & Me honors the life and partnership she shared with the late Hairy Biker Dave Myers. Matt Blake’s Hearth Of Darkness serves as a moving account of finding home in a haunted house and confronting personal pasts that refuse to stay buried.

The breadth of titles underscores a cultural moment in which readers seek intimate, unvarnished portraits of people who built or affected public life, as well as a deeper understanding of ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure. In many cases, the memoirs blend memoir, journalism and personal narrative to trace how memory, ambition and circumstance shape a life. The week-to-week cadence of release has transformed the year into a rich catalog of voices, styles and approaches, from the wryly humorous to the starkly candid.

Publishers describe the 2025 crop as a reflection of both nostalgia and the appetite for honest reckoning. The line-up draws from journalism, literature, politics, sport and cooking, illustrating how life-writing has evolved into a mosaic that invites readers to step into another person’s mind, if only for a few hundred pages. The round-up from Ysenda Maxtone Graham, originally published in the Daily Mail, signals a cultural moment in which memoirs and biographies are playing a central role in the broader conversation about identity, memory and resilience.

As a season of gifts approaches, critics note that these books offer not just retrospective prestige but a continuing conversation about how public figures and private individuals reflect the times we live in. They invite readers to consider how memory is crafted, how fame is navigated, and how ordinary objects, meals and moments accumulate into a life story that endures beyond the page.