(*1956)
Victor Sebestyen was born in Budapest. He was a child when his family left Hungary as refugees. As a journalist, he has worked for numerous British newspapers, including The London Evening Standard, The Times and The Daily Mail. He has contributed to many American publications, including The New York Times. He reported widely from Eastern Europe when Communism collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. He covered the wars in former Yugoslavia and the breakup of the Soviet Union. At The London Evening Standard he was foreign editor, media editor and chief leader writer.
Victor Sebestyen’s first book, Twelve Days (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006, Pantheon 2006), was an acclaimed history of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. It was translated into 12 languages. His second, Revolution 1989 (W&N 2009, Pantheon 2009) was a highly praised account of the fall of the Soviet empire.
In 2017 he published Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, a full-scale biography of the man who led the Russian Revolution and created the world’s first Communist State.
Books: