Orlando Figes
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he graduated with a Double-Starred First from Cambridge University, where he was a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999. He is the author of ten books on Russian and European history, including A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, which in 1997 received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia was also short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, the Prix Médicis and the Premio Roma. His other books include Crimea: The Last Crusade, Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 and The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. The Story of Russia (published in September 2021 by Bloomsbury) is his latest book.