M. Gessen
#About
M. Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014 and was a staff writer from 2017 to 2024. Gessen is the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. They have written about Russia, Ukraine, autocracy, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among other subjects, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, they have been a science journalist, writing about AIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, they were dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. They are a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They are the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, a Polk Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award.
