Masha Gessen New Yorker Staff Writer Wins Prestigious 2022 John Chancellor Award

Columbia Journalism School announced today that Masha Gessen, staff writer for The New Yorker, is the recipient of the 2022 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism.

In a career spanning three decades and two continents, Masha Gessen has been an indispensable voice on some of the most important issues that face Russia and the United States. Readers have turned to Gessen to better understand the steady erosion of civil liberties under Vladimir Putin’s regime, the degradation of democratic norms in the Trump era and its aftermath, the state of L.G.B.T.Q. rights in both countries, the plight of refugees at the U.S. border and beyond, and, most recently, Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine.

In reporting that was both prescient and far-ranging, Gessen filed dispatches from Kyiv and Kharkiv just weeks before those cities were devastated; from Moscow as Russia’s few remaining independent news outlets shut down, one by one; and then from Istanbul, Tbilisi, and other destination points for dissident Russians as bombs fell on Ukraine. 

“As a reporter, Gessen has every gift: an unerring intuition for vital reporting targets; the ability to attain intimacy and rapport with subjects; an encyclopedic grasp of a story’s political, historical, and cultural context; and a fierce moral clarity that shines through at every turn,” said Jessica Winter, Gessen’s editor at The New Yorker. 

Gessen is also a prolific essayist and translator as well as the winner of the nonfiction National Book Award for The Future Is History, a title that hints at the wide-lens ambition and unique wisdom of their  journalism. They are constantly showing us not only how the past is inscribed in the present, but what it feels like to live through history as it happens. 

“As a New Yorker colleague and longtime admirer of Masha’s work, I’m thrilled to welcome them to the Journalism School to receive this well-deserved award,” said Dean Jelani Cobb, who is also a member of the Chancellor Board. “Their courage, laserlike reporting skills and fiercely incisive analysis help to set standards for our students and the entire profession.”

The John Chancellor Award is presented each year to a journalist for their cumulative accomplishments. The prize honors the legacy of pioneering television correspondent and longtime NBC News anchor John Chancellor, best remembered for his distinguished reporting on civil rights, politics and election campaigns. Selected by a committee of eight distinguished journalists, Gessen will receive the 2022 award with a $25,000 honorarium.

The award will be presented at a ceremony held by Columbia Journalism School on Thursday, November 17, 2022.

Masha Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014 and became a staff writer in 2017. They are the author of eleven books, including Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017. Gessen has also been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, 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. On a parallel track, Gessen has been a science journalist, writing about AIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics. They were dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes. Gessen is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, they have been living in New York since 2013.

The John Chancellor Award was established in 1995 by Ira A. Lipman. Mr. Lipman, who died in 2019, was the founder of Guardsmark, LLC, one of the world's largest security service firms. The jury is chaired by Lynn Sherr, and in addition to Ira Lipman’s son Josh Lipman, includes Dean Jelani Cobb, Cheryl Gould, Hank Klibanoff, Michele Norris, Bill Wheatley, and Mark Whitaker, as well as John Chancellor’s daughter Mary Chancellor.

Links to reporting by Masha Gessen:

• Reaching the Critical Masses (Lingua Franca, May/June 1994)
• The Day After Technology (Wired, March 1996)
• Autocracy Rules for Survival (The New York Review of Books, November 11, 2016)
• Collecting Bodies in Bucha(The New Yorker, April 6, 2022)
• The Russians Fleeing Putin’s Wartime Crackdown (The New Yorker, March 20, 2022)

Gessen is the author of 11 books, including their latest, Surviving Autocracy (June 2020).