Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is the winner of the 2026 Plutarch Award, given annually by the Biographers International Organization to an outstanding work of biography.
Wade’s book, published last October by Scribner, recounts the life of the modernist poet and novelist, as well as the years after her death, when Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, shaped her legacy. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a probing examination of an enigmatic writer.”
The award committee said of Wade’s book, “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife represents a compelling, original approach to Stein’s life and work and, ultimately, our thinking about biography itself. Francesca Wade identifies key figures in the reconstruction of Stein’s afterlife ranging from Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, to scholars like Leon Katz and Janet Malcolm, culminating in Wade herself. A ground-breaking addition to the literary study of this iconic and controversial figure, Wade’s biography further offers urgent and exciting new insights into life-writing and how we read and interpret another’s life.”
The other finalists for the award were Nicholas Boggs for Baldwin: A Love Story; Howard W. French for The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide; Max Perry Mueller for Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West; and Graham Watson for The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life.
The Plutarch Award, which comes with an honorarium of $3,000, was established in 2013. Previous winners include Hermione Lee for Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life; David W. Blight for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; and Yepoka Yeebo for Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
