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Writer Daniil Granin Marks 95th Birthday

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Writer Daniil Granin Marks 95th Birthday


03.01.2014

The outstanding Russian writer and honorary citizen of the City of St. Petersburg Daniil Granin welcomed the New Year and marked his 95th birthday on January 1. The year 2014 also marks 65 years since Granin first took up the pen and began crafting literary masterpieces.

The author received congratulations from around Russia and the world on his jubilee. Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote: “You rightfully command great authority as a courageous and spiritually strong person who survived the fiery trials of the Great Patriotic War. As a distinguished writer and author, as a Russian intellectual and thinker. Your literary works are steeped in a sincere love toward people, toward Russia, its great history and traditions.”
 
Granin started writing in the 1930s, when he was still an engineering student at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute. After graduation, Granin began working as a senior engineer at an energy laboratory and soon after the war broke out, he volunteered as a soldier.

One of the first widely praised works of Granin was a short story about graduate students, titled The Second Variant and published in the journal Zvezda in 1949. Granin continued to study engineering and working as a technical writer until achieving literary success with Those Who Seek (1955), a novel inspired from his life as an engineer. The book talked about the overly bureaucratic Soviet system which tended to stifle new ideas.

Granin has worked as a board member in the Leningrad Union of Writers and is a winner of many medals and honors including the State Prize for Literature in 1978 and Hero of Socialist Labor in 1989. He continues to write in post-Soviet Russia and in late 2013 his WWII novel My Lieutenant was recognized as the Best Foreign Novel of the Year in China.

Russkiy Mir Foundation Information Service

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