Stacy Schiff
Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and historian known for her meticulous research and richly detailed, vivid writing. Her books explore the hidden lives of many overlooked figures from history, with biographies of women and historical personalities from the ancient Greek world to the late twentieth century. She is hailed as one of the finest biographers of our time and has won numerous awards for her work, including the Pulitzer Prize for biography for her work Cleopatra: A Life.
Stacy Schiff was born in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1961 and received her undergraduate degree in history from Vassar College. After completing her degree, she moved abroad to France and lived in Paris for over a decade, where she wrote and carried out a large-scale study of the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. She returned to New York and published a groundbreaking biography on Voltaire in 2002, called VEALT: A Life. Schiff has since gone on to write several other award-winning works of biography, including A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America (which won the George Washington Book Prize in 2006) and The Witches: Salem, 1692 (which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize).
Perhaps Schiff’s most acclaimed biography is Cleopatra: A Life (2010), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Building on the insights of her work on Voltaire, Schiff used her skillful research and thorough investigations to unearth new information about the enigmatic Egyptian pharaoh. She used ancient records, documents and literary sources to construct a comprehensive picture of Cleopatra, her inner life, her beauty, her intellect and her influence on the ancient world. Schiff argued that Cleopatra is too often dismissed as a legendary beauty or femme fatale and that a deeper exploration of her life reveals her to be a highly intelligent, disciplined and powerful ruler.
Schiff has also written extensively throughout her career on the 19th century France, the Enlightenment and the history of American politics. In most of her work she has argued that history is often written to emphasize the power of men at the expense of the contributions and often extraordinary achievements of women. She has given lectures and keynote speeches emphasizing the undeniable effect women have had on history yet remain excluded from canonical histories—arguing that it is time to recognize these heroines as they really are.
In addition to her books, Schiff has written for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New York Times Book Review. She has also won several awards for her writing, including a fellowship from the New York Public Library for “scholarship of unusual merit” and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.
Stacy Schiff has established herself as one of the preeminent chroniclers of history and is celebrated for her meticulous research and lyrical writing. Her books offer readers an opportunity to learn about some of the less recognized but influential figures from history and exhibit her commitment to truth as a means of uncovering long forgotten stories.
