Vitaly Korotich

Who is Vitaly Korotich?

Vitaly Korotich is a Soviet, Ukrainian and Russian writer and journalist,. Vitaly Korotich was born in 1936 in Kiev. In 1959 he graduated from the Kiev Medical University. Vitaly Korotich worked as a doctor between 1959 and 1966. Later, he became as a full-time writer, and served as an officer of the Union of Soviet Writers.

In the late 1970s, Korotich became the editor of Vsesvit. a Ukrainian literary magazine in Kiev specializing in publishing literary works translated from foreign languages. His magazine was described at the time as one "that probably prints more of the latest American fiction than any magazine in Moscow".

In 1976, Korotich spent three weeks as a writer-in-residence at Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas. In 1984, still the editor-in-chief of Vsesvit, he was in New York as a member of the Ukrainian SSR's delegation at the United Nations General Assembly. In 1985, he visited Canada as well, participating in a campaign for world peace and for nuclear disarmament.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Vitaly Korotich was editor-in-chief of Ogonyok magazine in Moscow, which made, some say, a substantial contribution to the promotion of media freedom in the former USSR. The Ogonyok magazine, at the time when Korotich was at its head, was regarded as a "megaphone" for the perestroika and glasnost policies of the last USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev.