Dr Sigrid Rausing

Sigrid Rausing is a publisher and philanthropist. She founded the Sigrid Rausing Trust in 1995.

In 1993-4 she lived on a collective farm in Estonia doing fieldwork for a PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London, followed by a two-year honorary fellowship in the same department. Her book, History, Memory and Identity in Post Soviet Estonia: the End of a Collective Farm, was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, and was preceded by a number of scholarly articles in a range of academic journals.

In 2005 she co-founded the publishing house Portobello Books with her husband, film and theatre producer Eric Abraham, and the publisher Philip Gwyn Jones. The same year she bought Granta Publications from the New York publisher, Rea Hederman. She is the publisher and editor of Granta magazine, and the publisher of Granta Books.

In 2004 she was the joint winner of the International Service Human Rights Award, in the Global Human Rights Defender category. In 2005 she won a Beacon Special Award for philanthropy. In 2006 she was awarded the Women’s Funding Network’s ‘Changing the Face of Philanthropy’ Award.

She is a member of the jury of the Per Anger Prize for human rights defenders, and an emeritus board member of the Order of the Teaspoon, a Swedish organisation against political and religious extremism.

She was the judge of the Amnesty Media Awards in 2009 and 2010. In 2012 she was a judge of the Index on Censorship Media Awards. She is an Emeritus member of the international board of Human Rights Watch, and  served on the advisory board of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court.

In 2010 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and in 2011 she was the recipient of the Morrell Fellowship from the University of York. In 2014 she became an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.

Also in 2014 her second book, Everything is Wonderful, was published by Grove Atlantic in the UK and US, and Bonniers in Sweden. It will also be published in France, Poland and Estonia.