Sue Prideaux.
SUE PRIDEAUX
I AM DYNAMITE: A LIFE OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (2018)
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize.
The Times Biography of the Year.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a hugely influential German philosopher. He saw humans as subject to competing wills, which he regarded colllectivley as tthe ‘will to power’. In his later work he became interested in the creative powers of the individual to overcome convential morality to discover new values. He drew on a wide range of work, including that of Zoroaster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Dostoevsky.
At the age of 44 he suffered a collapse, followed by loss of his mental abilities, probably caused by dementia. He was cared for by his mother and sister until in 1900 when he died after suffering a stroke.
Hugo Rikind wrote of the book in the Times: ‘It is just such a blast to read. Witty, terribly clever and steeped in the wild, doomed peculiarities of 19th-century Germania, it is a tremendous and reformative biography of a man whom popular history has perhaps done a disservice.’
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Sue Prideaux is an Anglo Norwegian biographer. Her first book, a biography of the artist Edvard Munch, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her second biography, of the playwright August Strindberg, won the Duff Cooper Prize. Her biography of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche won the Hawthornden Prize.
