Vasily Grossman

Grossman trained as a chemical engineer and worked in the Donbas coal mines before he ever published fiction; the Second World War remade him into one of the Red Army's most fearless correspondents, following the fighting from Stalingrad's rubble into the liberated camp at Treblinka. His mother was murdered by the Nazis in his native Berdychiv, a loss that shadows every page of his later work.

Life and Fate's confiscation by the KGB in 1961 (agents took even the ribbons from his typewriters) was meant to erase the book entirely; an official told him flatly it would not see print for two centuries. A microfilmed copy, hidden by friends, escaped to the West and appeared in 1980, sixteen years after Grossman's death, and his last, equally suppressed novel, Everything Flows, pushed his reckoning with Soviet crimes further still, into the engineered famine in Ukraine.