Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, journalist and commentator on geopolitics as well as an acclaimed speaker. A senior fellow of international affairs and Agora fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, Anne provides both background and up-to-the-minute insights that are vital for understanding the risks and opportunities of today’s world political and economic climate.

Anne Applebaum is the author of several critically acclaimed books. Gulag: A History won the Pulitzer Prize, while Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine earned the 28th Lionel Gelber Prize 2018 and her second Duff Cooper Prize. Her 2020 NYT best-seller Twilight of Democracy was listed among Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year. Her latest work, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (2024), was also a New York Times bestseller and named a “Best Book of the Year” by The Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and The Times. Her other books include Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1946, which won a Cundill Prize for Historical Literature, and Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe.

Anne Applebaum worked as a columnist for The Washington Post, as a foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine, political editor of the Evening Standard and a Warsaw correspondent for The Economist (1988-91), covering the collapse of communism. She now is a staff writer at The Atlantic. 

She has held prominent academic and policy roles, including the Philippe Roman chair at the London School of Economics, director of the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute, and co-founder of its Democracy Lab. Anne Applebaum studied at Yale, LSE, and Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. In 2024, she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, joining past laureates Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen.