The Lionel Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture: Timothy Garton Ash for Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

Join us for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture with prize-winning author Timothy Garton Ash for his book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. The Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture will take place online via Zoom.

The Lionel Gelber Prize is awarded annually to the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues. The Prize is presented by the Lionel Gelber Prize Board in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

About the Book

In his new book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash gives a unique account of the history of Europe since 1945. This is history illustrated by memoir and reportage. Garton Ash draws on his extensive personal notes from 50 years of events witnessed, places visited and history makers encountered (from Margaret Thatcher to Vladimir Putin) to chart the rise and then faltering of the quest for a 'Europe whole and free'.

About the author

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of eleven books of contemporary history and political writing which have explored many facets of the history of Europe over the last half-century. They include The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name and Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals.

From 2001 to 2006, he was Director of the European Studies Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he now directs the Dahrendorf Programme. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague was reissued in 2019 with a new chapter exploring the 30 years since 1989 in post-communist Europe. His latest book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, has been translated into 18 other European languages. He is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Européen de l'Essai and the George Orwell Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen, for services to European unity.