ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs Arena, a research project that investigates disinformation and 21st century propaganda.

A Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a former member of the editorial board, she has also worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine in London, as the political editor of the Evening Standard, and as a columnist at Slate and at several British newspapers, including the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. From 1988-1991 she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent of the Economist magazine and the Independent newspaper.

Her newest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, appears in July 2020.

Her previous books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, which describes events leading up to the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War; and Gulag: A History, which narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps, making extensive use of recently opened Russian archives as well as memoirs and interviews. Red Famine won the Lionel Gelber and Duff Cooper prizes in 2018; Iron Curtain won the 2012 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature and the Duke of Westminster Medal, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004 and was also a finalist for the National Book Award.

Anne Applebaum is also the co-author of a cookbook, From a Polish Country House Kitchen, and a recently re-published her travelogue, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which describes a journey across Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine made just before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Over the years, her writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, Prospect, Commentaire, Die Welt, Cicero, Gazeta Wyborcza, and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in several anthologies.

She has also lectured at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities, as well as Oxford, Cambridge, London, Belfast, Heidelberg, Maastricht, Zurich, Humboldt, Texas A&M, Houston, and many others. In 2012–13 she held the Phillipe Roman Chair of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics. She holds honorary doctorates from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Relations and the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla in Ukraine.

Anne Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1964. She graduated from Yale University, and was a Marshall Scholar at the LSE and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Her husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, is a Polish politician and writer. They have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.