Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, as well as a Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics. She co-directs LSE Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st-century propaganda.
Formerly a member of the Washington Post 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, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, was published in October 2017. It received the Lionel Gelber Prize in 2018.
Her previous books include Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, whichdescribes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War. Iron Curtain won the 2012 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature and the Duke of Westminster Medal and was a National Book Award finalist.
She is also the author of 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. Gulagwon the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004 and was also a National Book Award finalist.
Iron Curtain, Gulag: A History and Red Famine have all appeared in more than two dozen translations, including all major European languages.
Anne Applebaum is also the co-author of a cookbook, From a Polish Country House Kitchen, and a recently re-published travelogue, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which describes a journey across Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine made in 1991, 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 Atlantic, The New Yorker, 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. The Washington Post column appears in newspapers across the US and around the world.
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.
Anne Applebaum was born in Washington, DC in 1964. After graduating from Yale University, she 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.
