Anne Applebaum is a commentator and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post.
She began working as a journalist in 1988 and later moved to Poland to become a Warsaw correspondent for The Economist. Eventually, a number of newspapers and magazines published her articles on the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe.
Returning to London in 1992, Anne became an overseas editor and later a spokesperson for the Spectator magazine. She subsequently wrote a weekly column on British politics and foreign affairs, which appeared at various times in the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and the Evening Standard. As a political editor of Evening Standard magazine, she covered the 1997 British election campaign. For several years she wrote a column “Foreigners” in Slate magazine.
Her first book, “Between East and West: Across the Border Regions of Europe,” describes a trip to Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus on the eve of their independence.
Her new book, The Gulag: A History, was published in April 2003 in America and the United Kingdom. The book tells the story of the Soviet concentration camp system and describes daily life in the camps. This was facilitated by the extensive use of recently opened Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews. The Gulag: History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Science Literature and the British Duff-Cooper Prize. The book reached the finals of competitions for the National Book Award, the National Critics Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Award. Translated into more than 20 European languages.
Over the years, her articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, the Boston Globe, The Independent, The Guardian, Commentaire, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Newsweek, the New Criterion, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review, among others. She has appeared as a guest and host on many radio and television programs, including BBC's Newsnight, the Today Progamme, the Week in Westminster, as well as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Sky News.
Anne Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. in 1964. After graduating from Yale, she was a Marshal Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Anthony College in Oxford. In 1992, she received the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust award for journalism in the former Soviet Union. The book Between East and West won the Adolph Bentinck Prize in European scientific literature in 1996. Her husband Radek Sikorski is a Polish politician and writer. They have two sons, Alexander and Tadeusz.
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