biographer

/baɪˈɑɡrəfər/

Other forms: biographers

A biographer is a writer who specializes in true stories of other people's lives. The finished books that biographers publish are called biographies.

In some cases, well-known writers, actors, and other public figures work with biographers in order to collaborate on their own biographies. Other times, biographers research the lives of their subjects after they've died. In the 1660s, they were known as biographists. The root of all variations on biography is the Late Greek biographia, "description of life," from bio-, "life," and graphia, "record or account."

Definitions of biographer

1. noun

   someone who writes an account of a person's life
   examples:

   Plutarch

   Greek biographer who wrote Parallel Lives (46?-120 AD)

   Giles Lytton Strachey

   English biographer and leading member of the Bloomsbury Group (1880-1932)

   types:

   autobiographer

   someone who writes their own biography

   hagiographer, hagiographist, hagiologist

   the author of a worshipful or idealizing biography

   type of:

   author, writer

   a person who writes (books or stories or articles or the like) professionally (for pay)