Anna Reid is a journalist and author whose work focuses primarily on the history of Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

.

Early life

Reid read law at Oxford University and studied Russian History at the University College London

University College London

University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

 School of Slavonic and East European Studies. After working as a consultant and business journalist, she moved to Kiev, where she acted as the Ukraine correspondent for the Economist

Economist

An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

 from 1993 to 1995. From 2003 to 2007 she worked for the British think-tank Policy Exchange

Policy Exchange

Policy Exchange is a British conservative think tank based in London. The Daily Telegraph has described it as "the largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right"...

, editing several of their publications and running the foreign affairs program.

Works

Reid has published three books on East European history: Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine, The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia, and Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II: 1941-1944. Critics have praised her for her highly descriptive narratives of the locations she studies. She has received especially high praise for Leningrad, which is the first 21st century book-length account of the Siege of Leningrad

Siege of Leningrad

The Siege of Leningrad, also known as the Leningrad Blockade was a prolonged military operation resulting from the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad, now known as Saint Petersburg, in the Eastern Front theatre of World War II. It started on 8 September 1941, when the last...

 (modern-day Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

) by the Germans from 1941 to 1944. In its use of newly-discovered primary sources from the Siege, including private diaries of ordinary citizens who suffered from cold and starvation during the winter of 1941-1942, the book has been called "a relentless chronicle of suffering."