Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes is the kind of historian who reminds me why narrative history still matters. A London-born scholar of Russia, longtime professor at Birkbeck and a Wolfson History Prize winner, he writes about revolution and upheaval not as a sequence of dates but as lived human feeling. That ability to pull intimate stories out of vast archives takes both talent and obsessive labor, and I value it highly. His work has drawn controversy over the years, which to me simply marks a writer who provokes rather than placates. The best history changes how a reader sees the world, and his books aim squarely at that.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Orlando Figes

Name (Japanese)

オーランドー・ファイジズ

Reading

おーらんどー・ふぁいじず

Born

November 20, 1959 (age 66)

Origin

Greater London, United Kingdom

Occupation

writer / historian / lecturer / university teacher / author

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Scorpio / Boar

University

Trinity College

Awards & achievements

• 1997 Wolfson History Prize
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando%20Figes
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3%E3%83%89%E3%83%BC%E3%83%BB%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%82%B8%E3%82%BA
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q513285

Tags

• writer
• historian
• lecturer

Last updated

November 2, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.