Difference Between Biographical Fiction & Historical Fiction
Historical fiction and biographical fiction have some commonalities; indeed, you can regard much biographical fiction as a subgenre of historical fiction. In both, authors use compelling stories to cause history of a specific era to come alive for the reader; and both require solid research as a foundation.
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Research
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Based on research, authors of historical fiction strive to seamlessly integrate authentic artifacts, thought patterns, and political and social events of the historical setting into compelling fictional stories.
Subgenres
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Apart from biographical historical fiction, historical fiction includes several subgenres such as Western, Regency and other historical romance, the Middle Ages and Biblical novels, as described at Findanauthor.com.
Past
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A good common sense answer to the demarcation between historical and contemporary fiction comes from Historicalnovelsociety.org: Unless the author is young enough to need to rely entirely on research to evoke a more recent era, historical fiction deals with eras at least 50 years in the past.
Biographical
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Biographical fiction uses as a foundation the imagined character of a real person, whereas other historical fiction may use entirely fictional characters although set in an authentic historical era. "A Midnight Carol," which is based on 19th-century author Charles Dickens, provides one example of biographical fiction.
Contemporary Biographical
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Another distinction between historical and biographical fiction is that biographical fiction can use as a foundation the life of contemporary personalities as well as those of historical figures.
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