Applebaum is an American journalist and historian known for her scholarship on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. She was born on July 25, 1964, in Washington, DC. She received her BA in history and literature from Yale University, received her MA in international relations from the London School of Economics, and briefly studied at Oxford University before moving into a career in journalism. She spent several years as The Economist’s foreign correspondent in Warsaw, Poland, in the final years of the Soviet Union. She later served as editor for the British news magazine Spectator and for the newspaper The Evening Standard and was a longstanding columnist at The Washington Post.

Apart from her journalism, Applebaum has also produced several books on Eastern European history for a general readership. Gulag was published in 2003 and won a Pulitzer Prize; it was followed by Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56 (2012) and the prize-winning Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017). In 2020, she published Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, a study in modern-day authoritarianism and populism.

Applebaum is married to Polish politician Radosław Sikorski and currently divides her time between Poland and the United States.