News Release

____________________________________________________________

March 24, 2005

Pulitzer Prize Winner Anne Applebaum's Keynote Speech To Wrap Up Women's History Month

Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum will speak at 7 p.m. Monday, March 28, in the Student Union Jordan Ballroom. The lecture by Applebaum, who won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for her book, “Gulag: A History,” is the keynote event of Boise State’s Women’s History Month celebration. Applebaum will sign books following the free lecture.

Applebaum will speak on “Tyranny and Memory: Lessons from the Gulag.” She will focus on how people in the Soviet Union were labeled, imprisoned and died in the millions in Siberia with little or no protest from their society, and will draw comparisons to the world today.

Applebaum, a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post, began working as a journalist in 1988 when she moved to Poland to become the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist. 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, Applebaum became the foreign editor, and later deputy editor, of Spectator magazine. She wrote a weekly column on British politics and foreign affairs which appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and the Evening Standard newspapers. She covered the 1997 British election campaign as the Evening Standard’s political editor, and wrote the “Foreigners” column in Slate magazine.

Applebaum’s 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.

Her most recent book, “Gulag: A History,” was published in April 2003 in America and Great Britain. The book narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camp system and describes daily life in the camps. It makes extensive use of recently opened Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, “Gulag: A History” won Britain's Duff-Cooper Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize. It has appeared or is due to appear in more than two dozen translations, including all major East and West European languages.
 

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1964. After graduating from Yale University, she was a Marshall Scholar at the 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.

-30-

Contact:

Lynn Lubamersky, Boise State history professor, (208) 426-3358, llubame@boisestate.edu; 

Melissa Wintrow, Boise State Women’s Center director, (208) 426-4256, mwintrow@boisestate.edu

Media Contact: Kathleen Craven, (208) 426-3275, kcraven@boisestate.edu;

Anna Fritz, (208) 426-1577, afritz@boisestate.edu

The Office of Communications and Marketing - Boise State University
1910 University Drive - Education Building, #726 - Boise Idaho 83725-1030

208-426-1577
(fax)208-426-4001

email newservices@boisestate.edu

Last reviewed on Thursday, December 22, 2005