Biographers Cathy Curtis and Will Swift present Tim Duggan with BIO's 2018 Editorial Excellence Award (Photo: Biographer’s International)
Celebrating the contribution editors make to the work biographers do has become a joyful highlight of the year for Biographers International. On November 7, in a ceremony at New York’s landmark Fabbri mansion, BIO presented its fifth annual Editorial Excellence Award to the noted trade editor Tim Duggan, publisher of Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of Crown at Penguin Random House.
Board member Will Swift explained in his introduction that Duggan devotes about 25 percent of his small, carefully nurtured list to biography, an unusually high percentage for a trade publisher. The lively observations of three ardent Duggan fans that followed suggested some of the reasons why he is regarded as a biographer's editor par excellence.
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David Michaelis, author of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, which received rave reviews when it was published it in 2007 by Harper, told the audience that after the book lost its first editor, he was dispirited. Fortunately, he said, Tim Duggan turned out to be not a wicked editorial stepmother but “a mentor” who possessed “a level of sympathy you don’t usually find in an editor. That sympathy, Michaelis said, "reunited me with my book.” Read More
Board member Will Swift explained in his introduction that Duggan devotes about 25 percent of his small, carefully nurtured list to biography, an unusually high percentage for a trade publisher. The lively observations of three ardent Duggan fans that followed suggested some of the reasons why he is regarded as a biographer's editor par excellence.
David Michaelis, author of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, which received rave reviews when it was published it in 2007 by Harper, told the audience that after the book lost its first editor, he was dispirited. Fortunately, he said, Tim Duggan turned out to be not a wicked editorial stepmother but “a mentor” who possessed “a level of sympathy you don’t usually find in an editor. That sympathy, Michaelis said, "reunited me with my book.” Read More