According to the Oxford Centre for Life Writing:

”Life-writing includes biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, anthropological data, oral testimony, eye-witness accounts, biopics, plays and musical performances, obituaries, scandal sheets, and gossip columns, blogs, and social media such as Tweets and Instagram stories. It is not only a literary or historical specialism, but is relevant across the arts and sciences, and can involve philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers and anthropologists.

But life-writing is more than just these kinds of written materials: it can be about love and loss; it can be about family, friendship, marriage, children; it can show how history might be captured in an individual life, or how an individual life is representative of its times. Life-writing has to do with the emotions, it has to do with memory, and it has to do with a sense of identity. Life-writing is vital form of cultural communication.”