Anne Applebaum

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an Polish American 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) and Slate Magazine. She is married to Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs 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 BA (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 columnist for London's Evening Standard newspaper. She wrote about both foreign and domestic policy issues.

Applebaum's first book, Between East and West, is a travelogue, and was awarded an Adolph Bentinck Prize in 1996. Gulag: A History (2003), on the Soviet prison system, was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction writing. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56, was published in 2012 by Doubleday in the USA and Allen Lane in the UK. In 2013, it was shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.

Applebaum is proficient in 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 2006. 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.

In the 2012–2013 academic year, she was the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE

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

Anne Applebaum-Sikorska became a Polish citizen in 2013.

Awards and honors

 * 2004 Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction), Gulag: A History
 * 2012 National Book Award (Nonfiction), finalist, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956
 * 2013 Cundill Prize, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956