Anne Applebaum - Career

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 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. Her third book, Iron Curtain, was published in 2012 by Penguin Books, ISBN:978-0-713-99868-9.

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 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.