Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen (2015)

Maria "Masha" Alexandrovna Gessen ( Russian Мария Александровна Гессен , Marija Alexandrovna Gessen; * 13. January 1967 in Moscow ) is Russian - American nationality and a journalist and a writer working.

Life

Masha Gessen was founded in 1967 as a child of an Ashkenazi - Jewish born family in Moscow, his * her family emigrated with him * her 1981 from the Soviet Union to the United States.

She later became Russia correspondent for the American news magazine US News & World Report . In 1991 she returned to Russia as a journalist to journalistically accompany the transition to liberal democracy . She * he reported on Chechnya as a war reporter , commented on the rise of Vladimir Putin and the time under President Dmitry Medvedev .

Gessen wrote biographies about the mathematician Grigori Perelman , who solved the Poincaré conjecture , about the Russian President Vladimir Putin and about Pussy Riot .

Masha Gessen is active in the lesbian and gay movement and moved from Moscow to New York City in 2013 because of the increasing repression against homosexuals in Russia . In 2013 Gessen also received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize for writers who are persecuted or threatened in their own country and therefore have to live in exile.

For The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (German: The future is history. How Russia won and lost freedom) Gessen 2017 received the National Book Award in the Nonfiction category. The book follows the life stories of four young Russians who were born when the country was prophesied of a democratic upswing; it will be awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2019 . The book was held back several times by Russian customs during controls.

As a non-binary person , Gessen prefers to be gender-neutral with the singular pronoun they .

family

Masha Gessen (2011)

The writer, journalist and editor Keith Gessen (* 1975) is Masha Gessen's brother. In 2000, she * he adopted a three-year-old Russian orphan boy whose parents had died as a result of AIDS . The following year she * he gave birth to a daughter.

Publications

• The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Republic . International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Comm, 1993, ISBN 1-884955-13-4 .
• Half a Revolution: Contemporary Fiction by Russian Women . Cleis Press, 1995, ISBN 1-57344-006-X .
• Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism . Verso, 1997, ISBN 1-85984-147-3 .
  • To the success of our hopeless mission. The Russian intelligentsia. Kunstmann, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-88897-197-7 .
• Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace . Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2004, ISBN 0-385-33605-5 .
  • Esther and Rusja. How my grandmothers survived Hitler's war and Stalin's peace. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-446-20583-7 ; Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-423-34496-8 .
    • In the mouth of the lion , review by Gabriele von Arnim in der Zeit , No. 50, December 8, 2005.
• Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, ISBN 978-0-15-101362-3 (New York Times Notable Book of the Year).
  • Chronicle of a Death Foretold , review by Jennifer Senior in the New York Times , May 11, 2008.
• Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, ISBN 978-0-15-101406-4 .
  • The proof of the century. The fascinating story of the mathematician Grigori Perelman. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42370-7 ; ibid. 2014, ISBN 978-3-518-46527-1 .
    • The genius lives in the Hotel Mama , review by Heinrich Hemme in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 3, 2013.
• The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Riverhead, 2012.
  • The Faceless Man - Vladimir Putin. A revelation. Piper, Munich / Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-492-05529-1 ; ibid. 2013, ISBN 978-3-492-30279-1 .
    • How the Fall of the Berlin Wall Radicalized Putin , excerpt in The Daily Beast , September 11, 2014.
    • Vladimir's Tale , Review by Anne Applebaum in the New York Review of Books , April 26, 2012.
    • Ann-Dorit Boy: Review . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . May 31, 2012.
• Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. Riverhead, 2014.
• Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Autonomous Region . Nextbook / Schocken, 2016, ISBN 978-0-8052-4246-1 .
• The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Riverhead Books, 2017, ISBN 978-1-59463-453-6 .
  • The future is history. How Russia won and lost its freedom . Translated from the English by Anselm Bühling. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-42842-9 .
• Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia . Columbia Global Reports, New York 2018, ISBN 978-0-9977229-6-3 .
  • To forget. Stalin's Gulag in Putin's Russia . Translated from the English by Sven Koch. dtv Verlagsgesellschaft, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-423-28172-0
  • Living in exile . Talk about migration. edition suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-518-12743-8 .

Prizes and awards

Masha Gessen receives the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding

• 2017: National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
• 2019: Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding for The Future is History. How Russia won and lost its freedom

Web links

• Literature by and about Maša Gessen in the catalog of the German National Library .
• Short biography and reviews of works by Masha Gessen at perlentaucher.de .
• Sonja Zekri: Writer Masha Gessen: A gay Putin as a paper jumping jack. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . 19th March 2019.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Arno Widmann : Ausselesen: From the criminal Vladimir Putin. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . March 2, 2012, Retrieved March 5, 2012 . 
2. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: Return of the same. Retrieved February 11, 2020 . 
3. ↑ Georg Diez : SPON - The critic: fairy tale king with a large knife . In: Spiegel Online . March 2, 2012.
4. ↑ The "Pussy Riot" Arrests, And The Crackdown That Followed . In: NPR . January 8, 2014.
5. ↑ Hannes Stein : Biographer: "Vladimir Putin is a monster" . In: The world . 3rd February 2014.
6. ↑ Masha Gessen: As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children . In: The Observer . August 11, 2013.
7. ↑ Masha Gessen: When Putin Declared War on Gay Families, It Was Time for Mine to Leave Russia . In: Slate . August 26, 2013.
8. ↑ National Book Award for Jesmyn Ward and Masha Gessen . In: Spiegel Online. 16th November 2017.
9. ↑ Masha Gessen awarded for her Russia analysis , boersenblatt.net, published and accessed on November 22, 2018.
10. ↑ Russian Customs began to check books from foreign online shops for "propaganda of certain views". Novaya Gazeta, November 22, 2018.
11. ↑ https://twitter.com/mashagessen/status/1275529665466302466. In: twitter.com. Twitter, accessed June 29, 2020 . 
12. ↑ Masha Gessen: Alter Girl . In: The New Republic . July 26, 2004.