Ellen Hinsey is the International Correspondent for New England Review. Based in Paris since 1987, she witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. More recently she has written long-form journalism about democracy in Russia, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and former East Germany, essays collected in Mastering the Past: Reports on Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism (Telos, 2017).

Hinsey is also the author of nine books of poetry, essay, dialogue and translation, including, most recently, The Illegal Age, which explores the rise of authoritarianism. Other collections are Update on the Descent, The White Fire of Time and Cities of Memory (Yale University Series Award). She has also edited and co-translated The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova and her book-length dialogue with Venclova, Magnetic North, explores post-war dissidence and ethics. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Poetry and New England Review. A former Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, she has most recently been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.