Anne Applebaum - Biography

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964 in Washington, D.C.) is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has been an editor at The Economist, and a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). She is married to Foreign Minister of Poland Radosław Sikorski.

Early life

Her parents are Harvey M. Applebaum, a Covington and Burling partner, and Elizabeth Applebaum of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School (1982). She earned a B.A. (summa cum laude) at Yale University (1986), where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987). She studied at St Antony's College, Oxford before moving to Warsaw, Poland in 1988 as a correspondent for The Economist.

Career

Applebaum was an editor at The Spectator, and a columnist for both the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. She also wrote for The Independent. Working for The Economist, she provided coverage of important social and political transitions in Eastern Europe, both before and after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1992, she was awarded the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award.

Applebaum lived in London and Warsaw during the 1990s, and was for several years a widely read columnist for London's Evening Standard newspaper. She wrote about the workings of Westminster, and opined on issues foreign and domestic.

Applebaum's first book, Between East and West, is a travelogue, and was awarded an Adolph Bentinck Prize in 1996. Her second book, Gulag: A History, was published in 2003 and was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction writing.

Applebaum is fluent in English, French, Polish and Russian.

On May 24, 2006, she wrote that she was leaving Washington to live again in Poland.

Applebaum was a George Herbert Walker Bush/Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, in spring 2008. Applebaum was also an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.

In a short blog posting in September 2009, Applebaum condemned the 2009 arrest of Roman Polanski. Critics claimed that she minimized Polanski's crimes and did not disclose that her husband was seeking his release. She responded in a second blog post that she had previously disclosed her husband's job, was not a spokesman for him, and "had no idea that the Polish government would or could lobby for Polanski's release".

In February 2008, she was awarded the Estonian Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, third class. In 2010, she was given the Hungarian Petőfi-award in Budapest's House of Terror Museum.

Personal life

Applebaum married Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski in 1992. They have two sons: Aleksander and Tadeusz.

Further reading

• Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Pantheon Books, October, 1994, hardcover, ISBN 0-679-42150-5; another hardcover edition, Random House, 1995, ISBN 0-517-15906-6 Introduction online
• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, April, 2003, hardcover, 677 pages, ISBN 0-7679-0056-1; trade paperback, Bantam Dell, 11 May 2004, 736 pages, ISBN 1-4000-3409-4 Introduction online
• Contemporary Review, December, 2003, review of Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, p. 379.
• History Today, October, 2003, Helen Rappaport, review of Gulag, p. 58.
• Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1994, review of Between East and West, p. 1095.
• The New York Times Book Review, December 18, 1994, Robert D. Kaplan, review of Between East and West, pp. 11–12.
• The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1994, Brian Hill, review of Between East and West, p. A11.
• Washington Post Book World, November 20, 1994, Marie Arana-Ward, review of Between East and West, p. 4.

External links

• AnneApplebaum.com
• 2005 Pulitzer Prize citation for Gulag: A History
• "Anne Applebaum, Opinion Writer" The Washington Post