Friday, May 29, 2026 – 2:30 p.m. – CUNY Graduate Center Auditorium – Her surprise was electric and her victory well-deserved. It was my pride and privilege to capture, from the first row, the captivating moment when — to gasps of appreciation throughout the crowded room — Mary Dearborn, chair of our 2025 judges’ committee (Emily Bernard, Andrea Pitzer, Sydney Stern, and me) announced Francesa Wade’s brilliant Gertrude Stein – An Afterlife (Scribner) as Winner of the BIO International Organization Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2025.
My four idealistic, determined colleagues and I had read our way(s) through 250 books to decide, as stated in our citation, that this was “a compelling original approach to Stein’s life and work and, ultimately, our thinking about biography itself,” tracing key figures in the reconstruction of Stein’s legacy — from her partner Alice B. Toklas to scholars like Leon Katz and Janet Malcolm — “offering urgent and exciting new insights into …how we read and interpret [the lives of others.]”
A London-based journalist and author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, thirty-seven year old Francesca Wade has published in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, and Granta. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
After the ceremony, when I shook her still-trembling hand, I felt Francesca’s gracious humility and generosity.