Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff is the author of multiple award-winning bestsellers and an acclaimed historian. The Wall Street Journal called her “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time.” Her book The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem was hailed by The New York Times as “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.” Joseph Ellis deemed Schiff’s the finest account to date of the witch trials; David McCullough declared the book “brilliant from start to finish.” Schiff’s #1 bestseller Cleopatra: A Life was published to great acclaim – it appeared on numerous year-end “Best Book” lists, including The New York Times “Top Ten Books of 2010,” has been translated into more than 30 languages, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is the author of Pulitzer Prize-winner Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), Pulitzer Prize finalist Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. All New York Times Notable Books. Next fall Apple TV will release a TV series based on A Great Improvisation starring Michael Douglas. In engaging moderated conversations Schiff captivates audiences with her power as a storyteller, drawing connections between the past and the most important issues today.

Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, a Boston Public Library Literary Light in 2016, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She received the 2019 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. Her most recent book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, is already a bestselling revelatory biography, and Ron Chernow has hailed it as “a glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important” and The Wall Street Journal declared it a "tour de force."

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Pulitzer Prize Winners