About Biography Studio
The story behind the studio.
The Genesis
On a shelf in our house in Cornwall, there is an old wood plane that belonged to a man I never met.
My grandfather died at 41, before I was born. I grew up knowing him only through my grandmother’s stories. She was a remarkable storyteller, and through her he became real to me: not a name on a family tree, but a man with a trade and a way of doing things. A man ever-present in my life despite not being there.
When dementia began to take her, it took her stories first. What I felt most acutely was not just the loss of her, but the loss of everything she carried. When she was gone, her stories were gone with her.
Richard Abrahams
Founder, Biography Studio
The Thread
There is a thread that runs through my family. My grandfather was a tradesman. My father was a tradesman. I began my working life on the tools, then went to university, then into a corporate career, then at 40 my wife and I bought a doer-upper in Cornwall to reshape our lives around a long held dream.
That is when my dad gave me my grandfather’s tools. The plane among them.
I have a young son, and I want him to one day understand who his father was at this particular moment. Biography Studio grew out of all of this: the wish that my grandmother had recorded her stories, the awareness that time is not something to assume, the experience of starting to answer the questions myself as I shaped the idea and finding what I did not expect to find.
The book at the end is real and beautiful. But the process of going back is where the treasure is.
What We Built
Biography Studio grew from that experience, and from something else: years of academic work in social history and ethnography, in how people construct meaning from their lives.
The questions in Biography Studio are not a standard memoir template. They were designed by people with backgrounds across ethnography, oral history, and the science of memory and identity, people who understand that the right question, asked in the right way, unlocks something a direct question never reaches. That is what we have built into every chapter.
We built the editorial process with the same care. When you choose to have your answers reviewed, our team shapes your words for the page: the hesitations of speech removed, the structure tidied, everything specific to you preserved entirely. Your voice. Your details. Your story.
Our Belief
Every life contains more than the person living it realises. The ordinary details. The specific memories. The values held and questioned and revised. The things that happened around you and shaped you without your noticing. The lessons that could only have been learned the way you learned them.
Most of it goes unrecorded. Not because it does not matter. Because no one ever asked the right questions.
That is what Biography Studio exists to do.