Ellen Hinsey is an author and independent scholar. Her work is concerned with history, ethics and democracy.
Early life and education
Ellen Hinsey was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University and a graduate degree from Université de Paris VII. For the last three decades she has lived in Europe. Hinsey has taught at the French graduate school the Ecole Polytechnique and currently teaches at Skidmore College’s Paris program. She is the international correspondent for The New England Review.
Literary career
Hinsey is the author of six books and has edited and translated three others. Her current work addresses global authoritarianism. Recent work Hinsey's collection of essays, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, examines new forms of authoritarianism. It includes first-hand accounts and analyses of the impact of the 2012 Russian presidential election and its aftermath, the rise of populism in Poland and the constitutional crisis, Hungarian illiberalism, Václav Havel's ethical legacy and post-1989 German reconstruction. A selection of these essays first appeared in The New England Review. In 2018, The Illegal Age was published. It is a philosophical-poetic investigation into the twentieth-century's legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality. Reviewer Chris Edgoose noted: "The word ‘important’ is over-used but in the case of Ellen Hinsey’s The Illegal Age it seems to me the only appropriate adjective. It is not a book we can afford to ignore. Like Robert O. Paxton’s 2005 The Anatomy of Fascism, this is a book which approaches its subject with the absolute clarity it requires. Earlier work Hinsey’s first book, Cities of Memory, draws on her experiences at the Berlin Wall on the weekend of November 9, 1989, as well as in Prague during the Velvet Revolution. The book received the Yale Series Award and was published by Yale University Press in 1996. Her second book, The White Fire of Time, written after a family tragedy, is an exploration of ethics and renewal. Beginning in February 2002, she traveled to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to listen to witness sessions. Her third book, Update on the Descent, addressed this experience, and is an anatomy of political violence. It was published in 2009 by Notre Dame University Press and Bloodaxe Books and has been called "an urgent, probing book." Reviewing the 2017 German translation, literary critic Gregor Dotzauer called it an "anthropology of violence," and notes that "Er zeigt auch, wozu eine Poesie in der Lage ist, die bereit ist, es mit so ziemlich allen Furien dieser Welt aufzunehmen." Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Welt, The Irish Times, Der Tagesspiegel, Gazeta Wyborcza, The New England Review and The Paris Review, among other publications. Her memoir collaboration with Lithuanian dissident and poet Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova, which examines postwar totalitarianism, dissidence and ethical choices, has been published in German, English, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Polish editions. Hinsey is the editor and co-translator of The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova. She has translated The Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, an account of growing up under the Cultural Revolution and Wild Harmonies by Hélène Grimaud.
Honors and awards
2015 DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm Fellow
2013 Pushcart Prize nomination for "The New Opposition in Hungary"
2012 Pushcart Prize nomination for "Death in the Forest"
