Events in Europe are unfolding rapidly, and we at The Spectator are looking for writers living abroad who would be interested in contributing occasionally to the magazine and our website. So we’re setting up a writing competition: the Timothy Garton Ash prize for European writing. It will go to the best original essay from any country in Europe, which will be published both in the magazine and online.
In 1978, Alexander Chancellor was looking for someone to cover events in Europe – someone actually living out there, rather than the many eloquent writers in London who knew what these countries were like years ago. Things were changing too fast, Alexander thought: The Spectator needed a new voice. Someone who could report what he actually saw. By chance, he was given a recommendation: a PhD student in Berlin called Timothy Garton Ash. His dispatches from Europe in the dying days of the Soviet Union were not just beautifully written, but perfectly captured the drama and the emotion.
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