Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars (Faber & Faber, 2020), which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Her work proposes a form of biography centered on women’s lives, on collectivity and community, on recovering hidden histories, and on challenging the scripts by which lives are lived and stories are told.

At Radcliffe, she is completing her second book, “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife,” a new biography of Stein told through the story of her posthumous legacy. She will also begin work on a new project, exploring the intersecting lives and work of several women poets and activists in 1970s New York.

She has received support from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She is a former editor of the literary quarterly the White Review, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, and other publications.