Sue Prideaux

Multi-award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux takes a fresh look at the life of the trailblazing post-Impressionist painter Paul Gaughin in this illustrated talk about her Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize-winning biography.

Prideaux draws on conversations with Gaughin’s family and her own translations of his writing to cast light on lesser-known details of the artist’s adventurous and complicated life. She looks at what shaped the artist, from his eccentric upbringing in Peru to a rebellious youth in France, life in the energetic Parisian art scene, meeting his wife Mette, encounters with Van Gogh and Strindberg, and the draw of Polynesia.

Prideaux’s biographies have won many of the top prizes for non-fiction including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, the Duff Cooper Prize for Strindberg: A Life, and the Hawthornden Prize for I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche.