Meek, a journalist and author raised in Scotland, was based in Kyiv and Moscow in the early 1990s, serving as The Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief for a period (part of the inspiration behind his most acclaimed novel, the Booker Prize-nominated The People’s Act of Love, 2005). He also covered the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts post 9/11. His essays of the past decade or so, some of which were collected in Private Island (2014), have mostly focused on the state of the UK and the selling off of its national assets.