Anne Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a reform Jewish family. She graduated from Sidwell Friends School in 1982 and earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in history and literature from Yale University. Applebaum spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, which influenced her views.
She obtained a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics as a Marshall Scholar. She worked as a correspondent for The Economist in Warsaw, Poland, from 1988. In 1989, she reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Anne Applebaum's book "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism" was published in July 2020 and became a bestseller. She was also a signer of the "Harper's Letter" in the same month. In November 2022, Applebaum was among the US citizens sanctioned by Russia for supporting the regime in Kyiv.