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Date	Title	Location
8 February 2018	'A Tale of Two Journalists: Gareth Jones, Walter Duranty and the Ukrainian Famine' given by Anne Applebaum	International Politics Main Hall

The David Davies Memorial Institute (DDMI) is delighted to announce its 2018 Annual Lecture. Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and journalist, will present ‘A tale of two journalists: Gareth Jones, Walter Duranty and the Ukrainian famine’. We very much welcome members of the public, university staff and students.

The lecture will draw on Anne Applebaum’s most recent book The Red Famine, which was published to a great acclaim in September 2017. The book has garnered a number of prizes, including the Sunday Times, The Times, and Financial Times Book of the Year 2017 awards. Applebaum will talk about the contrasting reporting of Gareth Jones and Walter Duranty as the famine was taking place. Famously, the Welshman Gareth Jones (graduate of Aberystwyth, the class of 1926) was the first to bring the terrible atrocities taking place in Ukraine to the readers outside the Soviet Union. The lecture therefore has a considerable local connection and will be of great interest to the general public.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and a prize-winning historian with expertise in the history of communist and post-communist Europe. Besides Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine her books include Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. She is a former member of the Washington Post editorial board, a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine, and a former Warsaw correspondent of The Economist. She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs and many other publications. She is currently a Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics, where she runs ARENA, a research project on disinformation and 21st century propaganda.

Jan Ruzicka, Director of the DDMI, said: ‘It will be a great honour to welcome Anne Applebaum to Aberystwyth. She is a great writer and we are truly privileged to have her as our speaker this year. In the 1930s, Gareth Jones showed the importance of reporting based on facts, while Walter Duranty wilfully ignored and denied the suffering of millions of starving people in Ukraine. The parallels with today are striking.’

Anne Applebaum will deliver the DDMI Annual Lecture in the Main Hall of the International Politics Department on Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 6:00 pm. There will be a drinks reception prior to the event. Entrance is free and all are welcome.

The David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies would like to express its gratitude to the Gwendoline and Margaret Davies Charity for supporting the Annual Lecture Series and the work of the Institute as a whole. The DDMI was established in 1951 to commemorate and develop the legacy of Lord David Davies of Llandinam.