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| Kai Bird (photo: Joshua Bird) |
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Kai Bird has been selected for the 2024 BIO Award, the annual award given by the Biographers International Organization to "a distinguished colleague who has made significant contributions to the art and craft of biography."
With co-author Martin J. Sherwin, Bird won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Vintage), which became the basis for Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer, winner last night of seven Oscars.
Bird is the author of six other books, four of which have been biographies. They include The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (1992); The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998); The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014); and, most recently, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (2021). He's currently working on a book about McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn.
Since 2017, as executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Bird has worked to advance the field of biography and to support and encourage fellow biographers. He is also a distinguished lecturer at the Levy Center and serves on the board of the Biographers International Organization.
Heather Clark, chair of the BIO Awards Committee, observed that Bird "has not only scaled the heights of biography--winning a Pulitzer Prize for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer--he has been an inspiring and approachable mentor to many first-time biographers as the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Under Kai's stewardship, the Levy Center has become the most important institute for biography in America. Through its prestigious fellowship program and illuminating lecture series, the Levy Center, under Kai, promotes young and established biographers and brings their work to a wider public. Lastly, Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer, based on American Prometheus, has brought both Kai and the genre of biography unprecedented global visibility. We thank Kai Bird for all he has done for biography."
Bird called biography "the best form of history. It's the most probing and intimate, precisely because it's about one other person. And yet through the biography of this one other person's life, you have a window into all sorts of history that you learn along the way. So it's also the most accessible form of history, too. It's very captivating to the average reader."