Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books, including GULAG: A HISTORY which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; IRON CURTAIN, on the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war, which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature; and RED FAMINE, on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, which provides the background to today's Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In 2020 she published the bestselling TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY, which analyzed the appeal of autocracy to Western intellectuals and politicians. Her newest book, AUTOCRACY, INC, published in July 2024, examines the network of dictatorships - Russia, China, Iran, Norht Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and others - who now work together to support one another, preserve their power and undermine the democratic world. Anne has been writing about Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989, when she covered the collapse of communism in Poland for the Economist magazine. She has also covered US, UK and European politics for a wide range of American and British publications. She is a former Washington Post columnist and a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine. She is married to Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician and writer, and lives in Poland and the U.S.