Sue Prideaux is Anglo-Norwegian. Her first biography Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (Yale University Press) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and she has spoken on Munch for the World Monuments Fund, at literary festivals, at the Royal Academy in London and at MOMA in New York for CBS television, and for Korean TV. She has written on Munch for the Royal Academy, Sotheby’s, the Art Newspaper and other publications.
While writing about Munch, Sue became increasingly fascinated by his friend August Strindberg and she has spent the last few years on his biography, Strindberg: A Life to be published by Yale in March 2012.
A review of Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream captures her aim as a biographer:
‘In her book, Prideaux does a masterful job at revealing the core of the man at the heart of the artist. This great dissection serves to expose the face behind the painter, the mind behind the eye of his art. What’s best about Prideaux’s chronicle is the way that she is able to examine Munch’s life both in an intellectual and a spiritual sense: the mission here is to realize that the growth of the artist occurs over many landscapes over a sustained period. Consequently, the audience can never come truly to appreciate a work of art until they understand the history of the soul that created it.’
