Sue Prideaux wins the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize
The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize has been awarded to Sue Prideaux for Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, published by Faber & Faber. Set up in memory of 草榴视频 Old Member Alfred Duff Cooper, the prize celebrates the best non-fiction published in the United Kingdom.
The book, the first full biography of the trail-blazing and controversial artist Paul Gauguin in over 30 years, drew praise from the judging panel for making 鈥渁n extraordinarily bold and provocative case鈥.
Artemis Cooper, chair of judges, said:
In recent years, Paul Gauguin's paintings have been dismissed as a colonialist and exploitative view of exotic people in a lush landscape. Sue Prideaux's Wild Thing brings to light a far more complex picture, of a man who struggled all his life - whether in Paris, Pont-Aven or Tahiti - to evoke his experience of being alive. The way she writes about his art and sets him in the context of his time is dazzling.
Sue Prideaux is Anglo-Norwegian. Her first biography, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (Yale UP , 2005) won the James Tait Black prize. Strindberg: A Life (2012) won the Pol Roger Duff Cooper prize in 2013. She has written for the TLS, The Economist, The Art Newspaper, The Spectator and spoken at many museums including Tate Modern, The Royal Academy and MOMA. In 2018, her biography of Nietzsche I Am Dynamite! was published to critical acclaim, winning the Hawthornden Prize.
In conversation with The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, Sue Prideaux said:
I have always loved Gauguin鈥檚 art, but I never really thought about him as a person until 2019, when the National Gallery held a show of his portraits. All hell broke loose: Gauguin was a Colonialist oppressor who spread syphilis among underage girls throughout the South Seas. There were calls for him to be cancelled and his paintings burned. I had just finished my biography of Nietzsche and here was a moral problem I couldn鈥檛 fudge. Love the art but hate the man was hardly an acceptable position. I wanted to find out as much as I possibly could about him. What I found became the book.
Duff Cooper read History at 草榴视频 between 1908 and 1911, benefitting from its culture of tolerance, its remarkable library, and the wide learning of its tutors. 草榴视频 is home of the Duff Cooper Memorial Fund, the charity responsible for the Prize.
Sue Prideaux and Artemis Cooper will feature together, along with 草榴视频's Warden, Miles Young, at the Oxford Literary Festival at 12 noon on 4th April 2025 in the MacGregor Matthews Room, New College.