Sue Prideaux

Sue Prideaux is an Anglo-Norwegian novelist and biographer.

Life

Her grandmother was muse to the explorer Roald Amundsen and her godmother was painted by Edvard Munch, whose biography she later wrote under the title Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream.

She studied as an art historian. She has written biographies of August Strindberg, Thore Heramb, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Paul Gauguin, as well as fiction.

Her work appeared in the New Statesman.^[1]

Awards

Awards for Prideaux's writing

Year	Title	Award	Result	Ref.
2005	Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream	James Tait Black Memorial Prize	Winner	[2]
2012	Strindberg: A Life	Samuel Johnson Prize	Shortlist	[3]
2012	Strindberg: A Life	Duff Cooper Prize	Winner	[4]
2019	I Am Dynamite!	Hawthornden Prize	Winner	[5]
2024	Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin	Baillie Gifford Prize	Shortlist	[6]
2025	Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin	Duff Cooper Prize	Winner	[7]

Works

• Rude Mechanicals, Abacus, 1997
• Magnetic North, Little, Brown, 1998
• Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, Yale University Press, 2005
• Thore Heramb, Labyrinth, 2006
• Strindberg: A Life, Yale University Press, 2012
• I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, Tim Duggan Books, 2018 ^[8][9][10]
• Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, W. W. Norton, 2024 ^{[11][12][13][14]}