On 30 May, spinPLACE hosted a meeting between Anne Applebaum and the community of the University of Silesia. The journalist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize came to Katowice in connection with the Congress of the International Federation for European Union Law (FIDE).
The Katowice meeting, entitled ‘Autocracy, Inc. and the Future of Freedom’, was moderated by Agnieszka Turska-Kawa, PhD, DSc, Vice-Rector for Science, and Prof. Tomasz Pietrzykowski, Vice-Rector for Vice-Rector for International and Domestic Cooperation. The starting point for the discussion was the journalist’s latest book, Autocracy, Inc. Dictators Who Want to Rule the World. During the discussion, topics such as the state of democracy, the quality of public debate, and social media were raised. There were also questions from the audience and autographs after the meeting.
Anne Applebaum analyses the challenges and opportunities arising from global political and economic changes through the prism of world history and the contemporary political landscape. She is the author of, among others, the acclaimed book Gulag, which won her the Pulitzer Prize, and Red Famine, for which she received the Duff Cooper Prize for the second time and the prestigious Lionel Gelber Prize. Her publications, such as Behind the Iron Curtain and Between East and West, have become the foundation of the contemporary debate on Central and Eastern Europe.
In 2024, she was honoured with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which had previously been awarded to Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen, among others.
Anne Applebaum has written for the world’s leading magazines, including the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Spectator. She has collaborated with Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books, among others, and from 1988 to 1991 she reported on the fall of communism as Warsaw correspondent for The Economist.
On Saturday, 31 May, the last day of the FIDE Congress, Anne Applebaum took part in a discussion led by Prof. Maciej Szpunar from the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Silesia.
