About M. Gessen
M. Gessen (formerly known as Masha Gessen; Russian: Маша Гессен) is a Russian American journalist, author, and translator who has written extensively on LGBT rights and authoritarian regimes. Gessen received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing for their articles in The New York Times, which the Pulitzer committee called "an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile." Gessen writes primarily in English but also in Russian. In addition to authoring more than 10 nonfiction books, Gessen has been an opinion columnist at The New York Times since May 2024 and was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 2017 to 2024. They have also contributed to The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report. == Early life and education == Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow in 1967 to Alexander and Yelena Gessen. Gessen's mother was a literary critic, and their father is a computer scientist specializing in forensics. Gessen's paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg, the daughter of a socialist mother and a Zionist father, was born in Białystok, Poland, in 1923 and emigrated to Moscow in 1940. Ester's father, Jakub Goldberg, died in 1943, in either the Białystok Ghetto or a Nazi concentration camp. As a Judenrat member, he was forced to assist the Nazis by, among other things, providing lists of Jews for deportation. Gessen's maternal grandmother, Rosalia (Ruzya) Solodovnik, worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge.
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