Francesca Wade has been named the winner of the 2026 Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2025, with her book Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner). The Plutarch, the only international prize of its kind, is selected by a committee of five distinguished biographers and carries a $3,000 honorarium.

This year’s committee, chaired by Mary Dearborn, praised Wade’s book as “a compelling original approach to Stein’s life and work and, ultimately, our thinking about biography itself.” The committee noted that Wade traces key figures in the reconstruction of Stein’s legacy — from Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas to scholars like Leon Katz and Janet Malcolm — and called the work “a ground-breaking addition to the literary study of this iconic and controversial figure,” offering “urgent and exciting new insights into life-writing and how we read and interpret another’s life.”

BIO president Steve Paul echoed the enthusiasm. “The enormous range and vibrancy of the Plutarch finalists are indicative of what seems like a surprising energy in our world of biography,” he said. “Many thanks to the Plutarch jury for choosing such a fascinating winner as Francesca Wade’s book about Stein.”

Wade is also the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars. A London-based journalist, her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

The 2026 Plutarch Committee — Neil Baldwin, Emily Bernard, Mary Dearborn (Chair), Andrea Pitzer, and Sydney Stern — considered more than 150 titles from the US and UK. A longlist of ten was announced in March, followed by five finalists in April.

The other four finalists were Nicholas Boggs, James Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright Publishing); Max Perry Mueller, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books); and Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus Books).

The remaining five longlisted titles were Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W.W. Norton); Kate Culkin, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press); Ruth Franklin, The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press); Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (W.W. Norton); and Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).