Russian and American journalist Masha Gessen is the winner of the National Book Award for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia—a powerful and urgent cautionary tale for our time.

Gessen is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of several books, among them The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. The recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, Gessen teaches at Amherst College and lives in New York City.

Her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own–as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.