Born on July 25, 1964, Anne Applebaum is a journalist and historian who is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. She covered the collapse of communism for The Economist and The Independent and has also written for The Washington Post, Spectator magazine, The Evening Standard, Slate, and The Sunday Telegraph. In Twilight of Democracy, she draws on her knowledge as a journalist and historian as well as her personal experiences living in Poland and observing the increasing polarization of Polish society.

Applebaum’s historical work has focused on the history of the Soviet Union. Her 2003 historical book, Gulag: A History, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. She is also the author of Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017) and the earlier Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which was a National Book Award finalist.

Applebaum is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She has helped create Beyond Propaganda, a program investigating 21st-century propaganda and misinformation and the actors behind it, and Democracy Lab, a website focusing on nations that are experiencing an alleged decline in democracy.