Timothy Garton Ash

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Timothy Garton Ash bigraphy, stories - British historian and author

Timothy Garton Ash : biography

12 July 1955 –

Timothy Garton Ash, CMG (born 12 July 1955) is a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has written about the Communist dictatorships of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity, especially in relation to free speech.

Awards and honours

  • Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon (1989)
  • Somerset Maugham Award
  • Order of Merit from the Czech Republic
  • Order of Merit from Germany
  • Order of Merit from Poland
  • Honorary doctorate from St Andrew’s University, Scotland
  • Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George
  • George Orwell Prize
  • Kullervo Killinen -prize from Finland (2006)
  • Honorary doctorate from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Personal life

He and his wife Danuta live predominantly in Oxford, although also in Stanford. They have two sons.

Notes

Life and career

In the 1980s, Garton Ash was Foreign Editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Independent. He became a Fellow at St Antony’s College in 1989, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in 2000, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford in 2004. He has written a weekly column in The Guardian since 2004 and is a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. His column is also translated in the Turkish daily Radikal and in the Spanish daily El País, Radikal.com.tr translations as well as other papers.

Education

Garton Ash was educated at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset in South West England, followed by Exeter College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Modern History. For post-graduate study, he went to St Antony’s College, Oxford, and then, in the still divided Berlin, the Free University in West Berlin and the Humboldt University in East Berlin.