Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author, and translator. They write nonfiction in English and Russian. Gessen is best known for The Future Is History (2017), which won the US National Book Award for nonfiction. In 2026, they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Among other notable works is The Man Without a Face (2012), a biography of Vladimir Putin.

Masha Gessen was born on 13 January 1967 in Moscow into a Jewish family. Their father was Alexander, and their mother Yelena. Gessen studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Cooper Union. In 1981, as a teenager, Gessen moved with their family to the United States under the Refugee Resettlement Programme.

Gessen began their journalism career reporting on AIDS in the gay press. In 1991, they returned to Russia to work as a journalist in Moscow. From 1993 to 1998, they served on the board of the Moscow-based LGBT rights group Triangle. They became one of the few openly gay public figures in Russia.

In September 2012, Gessen was dismissed as editor-in-chief of Vokrug Sveta magazine. They had refused to send a reporter to cover a Putin event, which they considered propaganda. Putin called them personally and offered to reinstate them. Gessen declined.

In December 2013, Gessen moved to New York as Russia tightened restrictions on LGBTQ+ people. Of their situation in Russia, they wrote: "I realised that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I was no longer seen as a journalist first. I had become a person with a pink triangle."

Since 2013, Gessen has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and other publications. Since 2017, they have been a staff writer at The New Yorker. In May 2024, they became an opinion columnist at The New York Times.

Gessen has written eleven books. The Future Is History (2017) won the US National Book Award for nonfiction. Other works include Ester and Ruzya (2004), an account of their grandmothers under Stalinism, and Surviving Autocracy (2020), which examines the Trump administration.

In 2026, the Pulitzer Board awarded Gessen the Prize for commentary. The committee cited a body of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes, drawing on personal experience and history.
Among the pieces named were "Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era" (May 2025) and "The Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well" (September 2025).
In 2024, a Russian court convicted Gessen in absentia over their reporting on the Russian military. Press freedom groups described the verdict as part of a wider crackdown on independent journalism.

M. Gessen holds a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They are the first Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Photo credit: FB @gessen