Abstract: Ira B. Nadel is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has published many biographies and focused on the research of the biography. His most recent papers are “The Fingerprint and the Photograph: The Fiction of Biographical Facts” (2014) and “Father and Daughter: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf” (2016), and at present he is completing a biography of Philip Roth. In 2017 Shi Miaomiao interviewed him during her visiting study at the University of British Columbia. This interview covers a broad range of topics on the ethics of biography, such as the major rules of biography, biographers' responsibilities, how to select facts and establish “a creative fact”. Professor Nadel points out that a biographer's job is to fill the space in-between events with causes. After clarifying its current status, Professor Nadel explores the digital future of biography with the advance of Internet and algorithms, which will replace a biographer's creation with the way of curation by means of digital information.

Key words: Ira B. Nadel, biography, ethics, algorithms, curation