Author and journalist Anne Applebaum has been named the recipient of the 2024 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which has a €25,000 (about $26,820) award and will be presented on October 20 in the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt am Main during the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Organizers described Applebaum as "among the world's most important chroniclers of autocratic systems of government. She is a leading expert in eastern European history and was one of the first to warn of Vladimir Putin's potentially violent expansionist policies. Applebaum has consistently garnered considerable international attention for her work, in particular for Gulag (2003), Iron Curtain (2012), Red Famine (2019), and Twilight of Democracy (2021), each of which traces the mechanisms of authoritarian power. She has also received several prominent awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and most recently the Carl von Ossietzky Prize in 2024."
Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, president of the Börsenverein and chairwoman of the board of trustees of the Peace Prize, said, "With her profound analyses of communist and post-communist systems in the Soviet Union and Russia, Anne Applebaum broadens our horizon and thereby reveals the mechanisms by which authoritarians grab hold of power and maintain their control. She also records and presents several witness testimonies that allow us to comprehend these mechanisms and gain further insight into them ourselves. Applebaum's research into the interplay between economy and democracy, as well as her work on the effects of disinformation and propaganda on democratic societies, sheds light on how fragile these societies can be--especially when democracies are eroded from within by the electoral success of autocrats. In her publications on autocratic forms of government and their internationally operative networks, Applebaum succeeds at combining historiographic insights with highly alert observations on the current state of our world. At a time when democratic values and achievements are increasingly being caricatured and attacked, her work embodies an eminent and indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy and peace."