Paulina Bren is an American writer and historian. She teaches at Vassar College as the Adjunct Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies on the Pittsburgh Endowment Chair in the Humanities.[1] Her earlier work focused on postwar Europe, particularly the history of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. She now writes narrative nonfiction with a focus on women’s history.

Early life and education

Bren was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. In 1968, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact Army invaded Czechoslovakia, bringing an end to the Prague Spring, and her family managed to leave for the United Kingdom just weeks before the borders closed shut.[2] Growing up in Watford, outside of London, Bren attended the Watford Grammar School for Girls and the Northwood College for Girls.[3]

Her family later moved to the United States, where Bren attended Garden City High School in New York, and then Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She majored in the College of Letters Program, graduating in 1987 with honors, and winning the Horgan Prize for short fiction.[4] She later pursued an M.A. in International and East European Studies, as a Jackson Fellow, at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and then a Ph.D. in European History at New York University, as a MacCracken Fellow, studying with the late historian Tony Judt.

Books

Her first book,The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell University Press, 2010), is a history of everyday life in the two decades after the Soviet invasion. The book cast one of the first lines in what would become a new field of study about late communism, winning the 2012 Council for European Studies Book Prize,[5] the 2012 Austrian Studies Association Book Prize,[6] and short-listed for the 2011 Wayne S. Vucinich Prize.[7] Her next book, Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012), is a collection of edited essays with Mary Neuburger of the University of Texas, Austin.[8]

Her first commercial non-fiction book,The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, is about the famous women’s hotel on 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City. It was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster in the U.S.[9] and by Two Roads/Hachette in the U.K.[10] It has been translated into Spanish, Italian,[11] and Russian, with foreign rights also sold to South Korea, China, and Hungary. Bren weaves the history of the hotel from its opening in the 1920s to its conversion to luxury condominiums in the 2000s to tell the story of its residents, of New York City, and of female ambition in 20th century America. The Barbizon was a New York Times Editor’s Choice,[12] and was reviewed in The New Yorker,[13] the New York Times,[14] the Wall Street Journal,[15] the Washington Post,[16] The Guardian,[17] The Times,[18] and elsewhere.[19]The Barbizon has been optioned for television by Rose Byrne and Lionsgate Studios.

Bren is currently working on a book about women and Wall Street in the 1970s and 1980s, to be published by W. W. Norton in the U.S. and Two Roads/Hachette in the U.K. It has been optioned for television by eOne Entertainment.

References

  1. ↑ "Paulina Bren | Vassar College". www.vassar.edu. Retrieved 2023-05-05.
  2. ↑ Willoughby, Ian (2019-01-07). "Paulina Bren: There was a large spectrum of collaboration during normalisation – just to function, you had to be somewhere on it". Czech Radio. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  3. ↑ "Homepage". Northwood College for Girls. Retrieved 2023-03-21.
  4. ↑ Aberbach, Katie (2021-03-08). "Digging Into a Landmark of Women's History: An Interview with Paulina Bren '87". Wesleyan University Magazine. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  5. ↑ "Past Book Award Winners – Council for European Studies". Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  6. ↑ "CAS Book & Dissertation Prizes". University of Minnesota. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  7. ↑ "2011 WAYNE S. VUCINICH BOOK PRIZE". ASEEES. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  8. ↑ Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. 2012-09-06. ISBN 978-0-19-982767-1.
  9. ↑ The Barbizon. 2022-03-15. ISBN 978-1-9821-2390-1.
  10. ↑ "Paulina Bren". Hachette UK. 2019-12-19. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  11. ↑ "Barbizon Hotel". neripozza.it (in Italian). Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  12. ↑ "11 New Books We Recommend This Week". The New York Times. 2021-04-08. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  13. ↑ "When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own". The New Yorker. 2021-02-26. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  14. ↑ Donegan, Moira (2021-03-02). "Some of America's Most Ambitious Women Slept Here". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  15. ↑ McAlpin, Heller. "'The Barbizon' Review: Landmark and Launching Pad". WSJ. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  16. ↑ Murphy, Mary Jo (2021-03-26). "The hotel that nurtured ambitious women and their New York dreams". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  17. ↑ "Lifestyle | The Guardian". the Guardian. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  18. ↑ Goodwin, Daisy. "The Barbizon by Paulina Bren, review — the former home of Sylvia Plath and Grace Kelly". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  19. ↑ "Paulina Bren". Paulina Bren. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
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