Biographers

A biographer turns a life into a book, and the people who come looking for one are usually not writers themselves. They are a daughter with a box of letters, a founder who wants the company story set down, a reader who has decided that a parent's account of a war or a migration should outlast the family. Some arrive with a subject and no material; some arrive with the material and no idea who should shape it.

The tags split the category along two axes. One is the ground covered: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, each with its own documentary habits, its own census years, its own migration records. The other is the working method. Personal biographers sit with one family and one set of papers; professional ones take on commissioned life stories for people they have never met, often working from interviews and archives at a distance. Family sits between the two, because a life story written for children and grandchildren is read differently from one written for a public.

Choose by what you already hold. If boxes of letters, photographs and recordings exist, a listing such as Family Heirloom Arts or Story Trust works from that material. If nothing is written down and the story lives in the telling, an interviewer-led service such as Life Story Writer or Share Your Life Story builds the record first. If the subject is a public figure or a company founder, the professional branch is the one that expects research and a wider readership. A private historian and a memoir writer for hire are not the same job, and the tags tell you which one you are looking at.