Timothy Garton Ash CMG, (born 12 July, 1955) is the British author of eight books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last quarter-century. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a weekly column in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He also contributes to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Prospect, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail.

Life

After studying Modern History at Oxford, his research into the German Resistance to Hitler took him to Berlin, where he lived, in both the western and eastern halves of the divided city, for several years. From there, he started to travel widely behind the Iron Curtain. Throughout the 1980s, he reported and analysed the emancipation of Central Europe from Stalinism in contributions to the New York Review of Books, The Independent, The Times and the Spectator. He was Foreign Editor of the Spectator, editorial writer on Central European affairs for the The Times, and a columnist on foreign affairs for The Independent. In 1986-87 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. Since 1990, he has been a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he directed the European Studies Centre between 2001 and 2006. He is now Professor of European Studies in the University, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow of the College and Honorary Chair of the European Studies Centre, as well as chairing the University's consortium of European Studies at Oxford. He became a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2000. A frequent lecturer, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts and a Corresponding Fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

His honours include the David Watt Memorial Prize, Commentator of the Year in the ‘What the Papers Say’ annual awards for 1989, the Premio Napoli, the Imre Nagy Memorial Plaque, the Hoffmann von Fallersleben Prize for political writing, the Order of Merit from Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, and the British CMG. In 2005, he featured in a list of 100 top global public intellectuals chosen by the journals Prospect and Foreign Policy, and in Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people. He was awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism in 2006.

Education

• MA in modern history from Exeter College, University of Oxford
• Graduate study at St. Antony's College, Oxford; the Free University in West Berlin; Humboldt University in East Berlin.

Awards and honors

• Somerset Maugham Award
• Order of Merit from the Czech Republic
• Order of Merit from Germany
• Order of Merit from Poland
• Honorary doctorate from St. Andrew's University, Scotland
• British CMG
• George Orwell Prize
• Kullervo Killinen -prize from Finland (2006)

Partial bibliography

• Und Willst Du Nicht Mein Bruder Sein...Die DDR Heute (Rowohlt, 1981) ISBN 3-499-33015-6
• The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82 (Scribner, 1984) ISBN 0-684-18114-2
• The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Random House, 1989) ISBN 0-394-57573-3
• The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (Random House, 1990) ISBN 0-394-58884-3
• In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (Random House, 1993) ISBN 0-394-55711-5
• The File: A Personal History (Random House, 1997) ISBN 0-679-45574-4
• History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (Allen Lane, 1999) ISBN 0-7139-9323-5
• Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (Random House, 2004) ISBN 1-4000-6219-5

See also

• European Council on Foreign Relations
• Journalisted - Articles by Timothy Garton Ash

Notes