Victor Sebestyen was born in Budapest. He was a child when his family left Hungary as refugees. He has worked for numerous British newspapers, including the London Evening Standard and The Mail on Sunday, and has written for American papers such as The New York Times. He was also an editor at Newsweek. Sebastyen reported widely from Russia and Eastern Europe when Communism and the USSR collapsed, and covered the wars in former Yugoslavia. He is the author of Lenin the Dictator (2017), Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (2009), and two books about Hungary, Twelve Days: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution (2006) and Budapest: Between East and West (2022).