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An opportunity to participate in an informal discussion with Washington Post columnist and editorial board member Anne Applebaum has been added to her campus visit today. The conversation with the author will take place 3 p.m. at Gilbert’s.
Applebaum will speak on “The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why it Matters” 8 p.m. today in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium. She will remain afterward for a book signing. The event is free and open to the public.
In the evening talk, Applebaum will share insights from Gulag: A History, her narrative account of the origins and development of the Soviet concentration camps, from Lenin to Gorbachev. Based on archives, interviews, new research, and recently published memoirs, the book explains the role that the camps played in the Soviet political and economic system. It also describes daily life in the camps: how people lived, worked, ate, slept, fought, died, and survived.
A National Book Award finalist, Gulag: A History was published in April 2003. “Anne Applebaum’s 677-page”Gulag: A History, the most authoritative — and comprehensive account of this Soviet blight ever published by a Western writer, puts the Gulag in its rightful, horrifying place,” states Newsweek.
“Applebaum’s book weighs in heavily in support of Solzhenitsyn on almost every point, and her account is backed not only by a careful use of the vast memoir literature, but also by a thorough mining of the long-closed Soviet archives,” notes The New York Times.
Her first book, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, described a journey through Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus, then on the verge of independence. Over the years, her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, Boston Globe, The Independent, The Guardian, Commentaire, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Newsweek, New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review, among others. She has appeared as a guest and as a presenter on many radio and television programs, among them BBC’s Newsnight, the Today Progamme, the Week in Westminster, as well as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Sky News.
Applebaum began working as a journalist in 1988, when she moved to Poland to become the Warsaw correspondent for TheEconomist. She eventually covered the collapse of communism across Central and Eastern Europe, writing for a wide range of newspapers and magazines.
Returning to London in 1992, she became foreign editor, and later deputy editor, of the Spectator magazine. Following that, she wrote a weekly column on British politics and foreign affairs, which appeared at different times in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, and Evening Standard newspapers. She covered the 1997 British election campaign as the Evening Standard’s political editor. For several years, she wrote the “Foreigners” column in Slate magazine.
Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. in 1964. After graduating from Yale University, she was a Marshall Scholar at London School of Economics and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1992 she won the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust award for journalism in the ex-Soviet Union. “Between East and West” won an Adolph Bentinck prize for European non-fiction in 1996. Her husband, Radek Sikorski, is a Polish politician and writer. They have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.