Stacy Madeleine Schiff (born October 26, 1961)[1] is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author and guest columnist for The New York Times.[2]
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Schiff, born in Adams, Massachusetts, is a graduate of Phillips Andover Academy preparatory school, and earned her B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990. Her essays and articles have appeared in, among other places, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement.[3] She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, which noted that she has been "regularly praised for both her meticulous scholarship and her witty style." (October 24, 2008)
Schiff has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.[4] and was a Director's Fellow at the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers.
Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Vera, her biography of Vera Nabokov, wife and muse of Lolita and Pale Fire author Vladimir Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography about Antoine de Saint Exupéry.[1]
Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America won the 2006 George Washington Book Prize. For that book she also received the Ambassador Award in American Studies and the Institut Français’s Gilbert Chinard Prize. In England the book was published under the title Dr. Franklin Goes to France.
Schiff's most recent biography, Cleopatra: A Life, was published by Little Brown in November 2010, reached Number 3 on the New York Times Bestseller List and garnered extraordinary reviews. The Wall Street Journal's critic wrote, "Stacy Schiff does a rare thing; she gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist." Rick Riordan declared Cleopatra "impossible to put down;" The New Yorker termed it "a work of literature;" Michael Korda called it "a masterpiece;" Tina Brown declared it read "almost like a novel in its juicy literary flair;" Maureen Dowd found it "captivating;" Simon Winchester predicted the book would become a classic.
Cleopatra won the 2011 PEN / Jacqueline Weld Bogrand Award for distinguished biography. Schiff's early New York Times op-ed on Cleopatra, "Who's Buried in Cleopatra's Tomb?" (April 21, 2009) won an EMMA award for journalistic excellence. To date, Cleopatra has been featured on the following "Best of" lists:
Schiff was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011 she was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library.
Currently a guest columnist at The New York Times, Schiff resides in New York City and Edmonton, Alberta.[5]
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