Timothy Garton Ash

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Timothy Garton Ash (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, Director of the European Studies Centre 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 magazine and the Wall Street Journal.

1 Life
2 Education
3 Awards and honors
4 Partial bibliography
5 External links

[edit] 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 communism 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 now directs the European Studies Centre and is Gerd Bucerius Senior Research Fellow in Contemporary History. 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 recently awarded the George Orwell Prize for political writing.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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)

[edit] Partial bibliography

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (Random House, 2004) ISBN 1-4000-6219-5
History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (Allen Lane, 1999) ISBN 0-7139-9323-5
The File: A Personal History (Random House, 1997) ISBN 0-679-45574-4
In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (Random House, 1993) ISBN 0-394-55711-5
The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (Random House, 1990) ISBN 0-394-58884-3
The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Random House, 1989) ISBN 0-394-57573-3
The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82 (Scribner, 1984) ISBN 0-684-18114-2
Und Willst Du Nicht Mein Bruder Sein...Die DDR Heute (Rowohlt, 1981) ISBN 3499330156