Masha Gessen is a journalist and the author of ten books. Her most recent book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, is a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. She’s the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She has received numerous awards, including a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, the 2017 Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, a Carnegie Millennial Fellowship and a Nieman Fellowship. She serves as vice-president of PEN America. Gessen was born in Moscow and immigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1981, at the age of 14. She returned to Moscow as a correspondent ten years later and stayed, becoming a Russian-language journalist in addition to her work for American magazines. She lives in New York City.