Nominated as a leading historian and critic of Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, a global intellectual, and a committed and creative defender of free speech all over the world.Timothy Garton Ash CMG (born 12 July 1955) is a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has written about the Communist dictatorships of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe in an increasingly post-Western world and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity -- especially in relation to free speech.
In the 1980s, Garton Ash was Foreign Editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Independent. He became a Fellow at St Antony's College in 1989, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution in 2000, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford in 2004. He has written a weekly column in The Guardian since 2004 and is a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. His column is also translated in the Turkish daily Radikal and in the Spanish daily El País, as well as other papers.
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
- Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name (Atlantic Books, 2009) ISBN 1-84887-089-2
Awards and honours
- Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon (1989)
- 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
- CMG
- George Orwell Prize
- Kullervo Killinen -prize from Finland (2006)
- Honorary doctorate from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium[6]
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
