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 2003 book "The Gulag: A History," on the Soviet Union's system of prison labour camps.
The award is traditionally handed out at the end of the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the world's largest publishing industry events, and is scheduled to be presented this year on October 20. It carries a prize of €25,000 ($26,740).
"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 told dpa on Tuesday that the award is an honour.
"It is especially significant to me, because my work on Soviet and East European history has benefited so much from research done by German historians and scholars," Applebaum said.
"I am also grateful to the jury, and everyone in Germany who continues to fight for peace, freedom and democracy in Ukraine, in Russia and in all of Europe," she added.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz congratulated Applebaum on the award in a post on X on Tuesday.
"The historian Anne Applebaum warned against Russian expansionism early on, she brings us closer to Eastern European history and reminds us how fragile democratic societies can be," Scholz wrote.
The award citation credited Applebaum with having "revealed the mechanisms of authoritarian seizure and safeguarding of power with her profound and wide-ranging analyses of the communist and post-communist systems of the Soviet Union and Russia," according to the Foundation Board's citation.
"With her research on the interaction between the economy and democracy as well as the effects of disinformation and propaganda on democratic societies, she shows how fragile these are - especially when democracies are undermined from within by the electoral success of autocrats," the citation continued.
Her other books include "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" (2017) and "The Twilight of Democracy" (2020). She previously worked as a correspondent for the UK's Economist magazine, where she covered Poland and the fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc, and was a columnist for the Washington Post.
She is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and is the mother of two sons.
Applebaum was born to Jewish parents in Washington in 1964. She has lived in Poland intermittently for decades.
Last year, the British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie was honoured with the prize.
The German Publishers and Booksellers Association has been awarding the Peace Prize since 1950 in recognition of individuals who have contributed to the realization of the idea of peace in literature, science or art.