Does reading biographies and autobiographies teach you empathy and help to improve communication skills?

Reading in general will help you improve your communication skills: you will gain more knowledge, learn more words, understand ways to structure a story or information, adopt better punctuation, improve your concentration, and many others.

If you are focused on empathy- I am no expert here. But it's extremely challenging to do this well. How many times have things not gone our way, and we assumed it was someone else’s fault ? Or we made a rash judgment about someone. The ability to get yourself still in the moment, suppress your biases and listen to others with an open mind is a never-ending skill.

What can help here? Biographies and autobiographies can certainly help. I recall reading a book about the Japanese business luminary Konosuke Matsushita. When he died in 1989, had personal assets of over $3 billion. But his early life was a huge struggle. He had seven siblings- five of them died by age 27, and the remaining two died by age 50. But he kept going. Everyone goes through some kind of struggle.

Courses may help. But I think meeting with people very different from you, learning foreign languages, and really understanding another culture are all elements that can help one be more empathetic.