Welcome to Sue Prideaux’s website. You will find information on her books and events. September 2024 saw the publication of Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. Buy the book here.

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin

Wild Thing has been published in America by W.W. Norton and has been named one of the top ten books of 2025 by The New York Times.

See here for the New York Times review.

It has also won the American Library in Paris book award. Sue was utterly delighted by the award and honoured to accept it in the Marshall Suite of the Hotel Talleyrand in Paris, the historic room where the Marshall Plan was signed. See photo gallery for pictures from the awards ceremony.

Other accolades following the US publication include:

One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025
One of The New Yorker’s Top Books of 2025
One of Vogue’s Best Books of 2025
One of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Books of the Year
One of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2025
One of the Chicago Public Library’s Best Books of 2025
Shortlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize
Winner of the 2025 American Library in Paris Book Award
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards

 

Wild Thing has also won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize and the American Library in Paris Book Award 2024. See pictures below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wild Thing won the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2025.

See here to hear Sue’s acceptance speech.

We are pleased to announce that Wild Thing was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024. See here for an interview with Sue, and here for Sue reading an extract from the book.

See here for Faber’s Wild Thing announcement.

See photo gallery for pictures from Sue’s research trips to Polynesia. For upcoming talks, events and literary festivals etc see Sue Prideaux’s author page on faber.co.uk.

 

Danish publication

Wild Thing has already been published in many languages. A Danish edition is to be published by People’s in 2026. Gauguin’s wife Mette was Danish and his son Pola, brought up in Norway, wrote much about his father and the family in Norwegian. Unlike previous biographers, Sue is able to read family papers and other accounts in Danish and Norwegian, some passed to her by descendants of Paul Gauguin, to whom she is very grateful.

For Danish readers, see here for Sue interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg, and here for Synne’s review of the book.

 

Previous books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See here for reviews of I Am Dynamite!

We are delighted to announce that I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche has won the Hawthornden Prize, an exceptional honour in the prize’s centenary year. Furthermore I Am Dynamite! has been long listed for the Cundill History Prize, the Rathbones Folio Prize, 2019 and  shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association non-fiction Crown.

I Am Dynamite! was The Times Biography of the Year, 2018. 

For recent writing by Sue, see here.

 

 

I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

The essential biography for anyone seeking to understand the philosopher who foresaw – and sought solutions to – our own troubled times.

“Witty, terribly clever and steeped in the wild, doomed peculiarities of 19th-century Germania, it is a tremendous and reformative biography of a man whom popular history has perhaps done a disservice.” Hugo Rifkind, The Times

Published October 2018

Strindberg: A Life

While Sue Prideaux was writing Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream she became increasingly fascinated by Munch’s friend August Strindberg.

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream

 The biography of the man who created one of the most haunting images of all time.

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.