Sue Prideaux Longlist Interview
3 October 2024
Wild Thing
A Life of Paul Gauguin
Sue Prideaux
In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia.
Prideaux conjures Gauguin’s visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist’s family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.
- First published:
- 12/09/2024
- Published by:
- Faber & Faber
- Length:
- Hardcover 416 pages
What the judges said"Sue Prideaux’s casts fresh light on this most incredible of artistic lives – and, in doing so, complicates our 21st-century arguments about his 19th-century escapades”
About the author
Sue Prideaux’s first biography Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (2005) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Strindberg: A Life (2012) won the Duff Cooper Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (2018) was awarded the Hawthornden Prize, longlisted for the Cundhill History Prize and Rathbones Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown and was The Times Biography of the Year.
