Stacy Schiff: On Cleopatra

Meg Wolitzer interviews.

Stacy Schiff is the author of the acclaimed Cleopatra, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She also wrote A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, among other publications. In this lecture, she discusses the unique role Cleopatra has played as a woman in history, as well as in our collective historic imagination.