Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist, geopolitical commentator, and acclaimed keynote speaker, Anne Applebaum examines the challenges and opportunities of global political and economic change through the lens of world history and the contemporary political landscape. Informed by her expertise in Europe and her years of international reporting, Applebaum shares perspectives on today’s volatile world events and their far-reaching implications.
As technology allows a new scale of media manipulation and changes the tenor of political discourse, Applebaum scrutinizes the misinformation, propaganda, and criminal exploitation that influence global affairs as well. From Syrian refugees to Putin’s disinformation narratives, Applebaum provides both background and up-to-the-minute insights that are vital to understanding the risks and opportunities of today’s global political and economic climate.
Her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History is about the Soviet concentration camps. Her book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine is the winner of her second Duff Cooper Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize (2018). In it, Applebaum proves what many suspected: Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. 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 (updated edition published in 2023). Other awards include the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2024 (previous winners include Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen) and, in 2021, the ICFJ’s Excellence in International Reporting Award and the Association of European Journalists' Francisco Cerecedo Journalism Award, presented by King Felipe VI of Spain.
In 2024, her book Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World‘ was published by Penguin. It became a New York Times bestseller and was recognized as a best book of the year by publications including The Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Times. Penguin also published Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism in 2020, about why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism.
She is a senior fellow of international affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., and the co-founder of the Democracy Lab, an online partnership between Foreign Policy magazine and the Legatum Institute, where Applebaum was director of the Transitions Forum from 2011-2015. An adjunct fellow of the Center for European Policy Analysis, she is also a former Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics.
Applebaum is now a staff writer at The Atlantic. For many years, she wrote a biweekly, internationally syndicated foreign affairs column for The Washington Post and was a member of its editorial board. She has been a contributor to Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. She was formerly foreign and deputy editor of Spectator magazine and political editor of the Evening Standard. From 1988 to 1991, she covered the collapse of communism as Warsaw correspondent for The Economist.
