Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash CMG FRSA (born 12 July 1955) is a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe.
He has written about the Communist regimes of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity, especially in relation to free speech.

Garton Ash was educated at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, before going on to Sherborne School, a well-known public school in Dorset in South West England, followed by Exeter College, Oxford where he studied Modern History. For post-graduate study, he went to St Antony's College, Oxford, and then, in the still divided Berlin, the Free University in West Berlin and the Humboldt University in East Berlin. During his studies in East Berlin, he was under surveillance from the Stasi, which served as the basis for his 1997 book The File.

Pavel Žáček, Timothy Garton Ash and Kristian Gerner (Tallinn, 2012)

In the 1980s, Garton Ash was Foreign Editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Independent. He became a Fellow at St Antony's College in 1989, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution in 2000, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford in 2004. He has written a weekly column in The Guardian since 2004 and is a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. His column is also translated in the Turkish daily Radikal and in the Spanish daily El País, as well as other papers.

In 2005 Garton Ash was listed in Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people. There it is mentioned that "Shelves are where most works of history spend their lives. But the kind of history Garton Ash writes is more likely to lie on the desks of the world's decision makers."

He and his wife Danuta live predominantly in Oxford, although also in Stanford. They have two sons.

• Somerset Maugham Award for The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (1984)
• Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon (1989)
• Premio Napoli, for journalism (1995)
• Order of Merit from the Czech Republic
• Order of Merit from Germany
• Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
• Honorary doctorate from St Andrew's University, Scotland
• Hoffmann von Fallersleben Prize for political writing (2002)
• Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George
• George Orwell Prize for journalism (2006)
• Kullervo Killinen -prize from Finland (2006)
• Honorary doctorate from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
• Charlemagne Prize (2017)

• "Premio di Giornalismo". premionapoli.it. 
• "Timothy Garton Ash :: Biography". timothygartonash.com. 
• "Eredoctoraten voor Maria Nowak, Timothy Garton Ash en Claudio Magris". Dagkrant Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (in Dutch). 22 December 2010. Retrieved 12 November 2011. 
• europeonline-magazine.eu, europe online publishing house gmbh -. "Historian Garton Ash receives Germany's Charlemagne Prize 2017 | EUROPE ONLINE". en.europeonline-magazine.eu. Retrieved 2017-01-22.