Timothy Garton Ash

Biography

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of ten books of contemporary history and political writing is which have explored many facets of the history of Europe over the last half-century. They include The Polish Revolution: Solidarity The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent and Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals.

From 2001 to 2006, he was Director of the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he now directs the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom. Its Free Speech Debate research project, built around the 13 language website freespeechdebate.com, contributed greatly to the writing of his most recent book Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World.

Prizes he has received for his writing include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Européen de l’Essai, the Theodor Heuss Prize and the George Orwell Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from St Andrew’s University, Sheffield Hallam University and the Catholic University of Leuven, the Order of Merit from Germany, Poland and Czech Republic, and the British CMG. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, The Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. In 2017, he was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen, for services to European unity.