The Polish-American journalist Anne Applebaum will receive the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2024, the award's Foundation Board announced on Tuesday.
Applebaum is a writer for The Atlantic magazine in the United States who has written extensively about Central and Eastern Europe. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on a history of the Soviet Union's Gulag system of prison labour camps.
The award is traditionally presented at the end of the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the world's largest publishing industry events, and will be presented this year on October 20.
"At a time when democratic values and achievements are increasingly being caricatured and attacked, her work embodies an eminent and indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy and peace," the award citation said of Applebaum.
She is a frequent critic of authoritarian regimes and has long warned of the threat of violent expansionist policies from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Applebaum was born to Jewish parents in Washington in 1964. She has lived in Poland intermittently for decades.
She is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and is the mother of two sons.
Last year, the British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie was honoured.