Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff has garnered universal acclaim for her work on such luminaries as Ben Franklin and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Recently she took on one of the greatest figures in history: Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt. The match between subject and biographer couldn’t be more perfect; as Joseph J. Ellis puts it, “It is a beautiful pairing–the most alluring and elusive woman in recorded history, and one of the most gifted biographers of our time.”
Schiff received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). Her first book Saint-Exupéry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of numerous awards abroad. Schiff is the author as well of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, which won the 2005 George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Institut Français’s Gilbert Chinard Prize.
A Great Improvisation was as well a Los Angeles Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, and Economist Best Book of the Year. All three biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions.
Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities, and was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She contributes regularly to the New York Times op-ed page, where she has been a guest columnist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications. She received an Exceptional Merit in Media Award (EMMA) for her 2009 New York Times op-ed piece, “Who’s Buried in Cleopatra’s Tomb?” Schiff lives in New York City.
