Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin

“She goes right back, in a very conventional structure, to relate an extremely unconventional life: Gauguin’s revolutionary grandmother, his beautiful artist mother, his growing up in France, but feeling himself to be alienated from it, ‘a savage from Peru’. She shows the comedy of his nature and character, coupled with, often, the extraordinary sadness of the reversals and sufferings that he endured…It’s also beautifully illustrated. There are wonderful juxtapositions—of Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh with van Gogh’s portrait of Gauguin. There are intelligently, understatedly captioned, huge, luscious Gauguin paintings throughout the book. It’s a very pleasant, beautiful object to handle, to touch, as much as to look at.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize

Minoo Dinshaw, Biographer

“It’s about one of the most important painters of his age, a man who helped to steer art towards post-Impressionism and was a huge influence on a whole generation. It’s also rather an extraordinary life…Sue Prideaux is a master storyteller and a wonderful biographer, and the book really argued its way onto the shortlist without much resistance.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Isabel Hilton, Journalist

“I had no idea he spent his first seven years in Peru, running wild in a palace with jaguars and volcanos—it reads like a magical realist South American novel. Then his mother took him back to France, aged seven. He couldn’t speak French, and he was put in a very strict Catholic seminary. When they bullied him, he put up his fists and said, ‘I’m a wild thing from Peru.’ That gave me the title of the book, but it also gave him his attitude from then on. He’s an outsider, and he’s searching for comparable places. When he lost all his money, the French government paid his passage out to Tahiti to be the official artist.” Read more...

Five Biographies of Artists

Sue Prideaux, Biographer