Daniil Alexandrovich Granin, original family name German, is an author born in the former Soviet Union. Granin started writing in the 1930s, while 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 shortly after war broke out, he volunteered to fight as a soldier. One of the first widely praised works of Granin was a short story about graduate students titled "Variant vtoroi", which was published in the journal Zvezda in 1949. Granin had continued to study engineering and work as a technical writer before he achieved literary success, thanks to his Iskateli, a novel inspired by his career in engineering. This book was about the overly bureaucratic Soviet system, which tended to stifle new ideas. Granin served as a board member of the Leningrad Union of Writers, and he was a winner of many medals and honors including the State Prize for Literature in 1978 and Hero of Socialist Labor 1989. He has continued to write in the post-Soviet era. 

January 1st, 1919 in Kursk Oblast  /  Died:   Jul 4th, 2017