Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is the author of eleven books and a staff writer for the New Yorker. In addition to Surviving Autocracy (2020), their recent books include The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017), which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy (2015), about the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Gessen has written extensively about Russia, autocracy, LGBT rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, and, on a parallel track, has been a science journalist, writing about AIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, they were dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes.

Gessen is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and the recipient of Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and Nieman Fellowships, as well as the Hitchens Prize and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, they have been living in New York since 2013.