Stacy Schiff

Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) won the George Washington Book Prize. Her fourth book, Cleopatra: A Life, was published in 2010. As the Wall Street Journal's reviewer put it, "Schiff does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist." The New Yorker termed the book "a work of literature;" Simon Winchester predicted "it will become a classic." Cleopatra appeared on The New York Times's Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the 2011 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography.

Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Vera, a biography of Vera Nabokov, wife and muse of Vladimir Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography of Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

Stacy Madeleine Schiff (born October 26, 1961) is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies; her biography of Vera Nabokov, the wife and muse of Russia/American novelist Vladimir Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Schiff was born in Adams, Massachusetts, to Morton Schiff, the president Schiff Clothing, a store founded by Schiff's great-grandfather in 1897, and Helen, a professor of French literature at North Adams State college (now called Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts). Schiff then graduated from Phillips Academy (Andover) preparatory school, and subsequently earned her B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post.

Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.

Little, Brown published The Witches: Salem, 1692 in 2015. The New York Times described it as "an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative." David McCullough declared the book "brilliant from start to finish." In 2018 the French Ministry of Culture named Schiff a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.