Sigrid Rausing

Sigrid Maria Elisabet Rausing (born 29 January 1962) is a Swedish philanthropist, anthropologist and publisher. She is the founder of the Sigrid Rausing Trust, one of the United Kingdom's largest philanthropic foundations, and owner of Granta magazine and Granta Books. Early life Rausing grew up in Lund, Sweden, and studied History at the University of York between 1983 and 1986. She earned an MSc in Social Anthropology from University College London in 1987, then continued with a PhD focusing on post-Soviet anthropology, and did her fieldwork on a collective farm in Estonia, in 1993–94. In 1997, she was awarded a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Department of Social Anthropology at University College London, followed by an honorary post-doctorate in the same department. Career Writing Rausing's monograph based on her PhD, History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. The book was preceded by a range of articles in scholarly journals, including Ethnologie Française. Rausing writes occasional columns for the New Statesman, and her articles on human rights have appeared in The Guardian and The Sunday Times.