The Biographer's Tale is a book written by A. S. Byatt. The story follows a student who is studying for a higher degree, named Phineas G. Nanson, as he decides to write a biography about a little-known biographer named Scholes Destry-Scholes. While researching, he learns little about Scholes Destry-Scholes himself. Instead, he finds many unpublished works by Destry-Scholes about real people like Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen. In the book, Byatt mixes real facts with made-up stories when describing the lives of these three people.

Byatt first planned it as a short story called The Biography of a Biographer, inspired by her idea of a biographer researching someone else's life in a library. She later expanded this idea into the story about Phineas G. Nanson and his search. Phineas Gilbert Nanson’s full name is inspired by an insect and is almost an anagram of the names Galton, Ibsen, and Linnaeus. Byatt said this was a strange coincidence she noticed later.