Catherine Merridale is an award-winning writer and broadcaster with an internationally acknowledged expertise in Russia and the former Soviet Union. A pioneer of oral history in the region, her first major book, Night of Stone (Granta, 2000), won the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001. More recently, Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History (Allen Lane, 2013) won both the Wolfson History Prize and the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2014. Ivan's War (Faber, 2005) tells the stories of ordinary Red Army soldiers in Europe's last great land-based war, while Lenin on the Train (Allen Lane, 2016) tracks Europe's collective and bungling responsibility for the Great October Revolution.