Nonino Prize 2019 ‘Master of our time’
Anne Applebaum
MOTIVATION
Anne Applebaum is one of the great moral witnesses of our time, and one of the most significant of international public intellectuals. She is a historian and journalist, whose work on the history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, and on the resurgence of nationalism and populism in the twenty-first, is of the highest importance. Born in Washington DC, Professor Applebaum holds American and Polish citizenship. She is the recipient of many awards and academic honours. Her book, Gulag: A History, won the Pulitzer Prize and a nomination for the National Book Award. She has written for many leading journals in Britain and the USA, and was on the editorial board of The Washington Post from 2002 to 2006.
The prize is delivered by John Banville
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Washington in 1964 from a Jewish family and naturalized Polish, she is married to the Polish politician and writer Radoslaw Sikorski with whom she has two children Alexander and Tadeusz.
She is a columnist for The Washington Post, a professor of Practice at the London School of Economics, a historian, an essayist and Pulitzer Prize winner.
After graduating from Yale University, she won a Marshall Fellowship from LSE where she received a Master Degree in International Relations and then she studied at St. Antony’s College in Oxford. In 1988 she started working as a journalist, as a correspondent for The Economist in Warsaw.
Her first book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe is the account of a journey through Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, Countries that were taking the last steps towards independence. After living more than 15 years in Europe, in 2002 she became a columnist for The Washington Post where she was also a member of the editorial board until 2006. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 with the essay Gulag: A History, she is Professor of Practice at the Institute of Global Affairs of the LSE, where she runs Arena, an innovative program on disinformation and propaganda in the 21st century.
She worked as Foreign Director and Deputy Director of The Spectator magazine in London, as Political Editor of The Evening Standard, as editor for Slate and several British newspapers, including the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.
Her writings have been published in The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Guardian, Prospect, Commentaire, Die Welt, Cicero, Gazeta Wyborcza and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as several anthologies.
In 2012-13 she held the Philippe Roman Chair of History and International Relations at the LSE.
In 2012 she published Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (published by Penguin Books) which describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War. Iron Curtain won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature and the Duke of Westminster Medal.
Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 have been published in many translations, including all the major European languages. Both books were finalists in the National Book Award. In 2017 she published Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine the Italian translation of which will be published in May 2019 by Mondadori publishing house.