Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is the author of six books, including, most recently, “Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot.”

Born in Moscow, Ms. Gessen emigrated to the United States as a teenager. She took her first journalism job at the age of 17, at a biweekly Boston newspaper devoted to gay issues. From 1984 until 1992 she covered the AIDS crisis for gay news publications.

In 1991, a magazine assignment brought Ms. Gessen back to the Soviet Union for the first time since her emigration. Throughout the 1990s she covered the transition in the former Soviet Union and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. She was a special correspondent for The New Republic and wrote for many other magazines.

From 1994 Ms. Gessen was based out of Moscow, and later began writing in both Russian and English. She helped to found Itogi, the first weekly magazine in post-Soviet Russia. She served as its chief correspondent until 2001, when she became head of U.S. News & World Report’s Moscow bureau. Three years later she returned to the Russian-language press. She has edited several Russian magazines, including the popular-science monthly Vokrug Sveta, from which she was fired for refusing to send a reporter to cover President Vladimir V. Putin’s piloting, with a hang glider, of Siberian cranes.

Ms. Gessen has reported on a range of topics, including the Russian intelligentsia, medical genetics and mathematics. Her 2011 biography of Mr. Putin, “The Man Without Without a Face,” was an international bestseller.

Ms. Gessen returned to New York City in 2013. She is currently working on a book about the Tsarnaev brothers, the two suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.