Mikhail Sholokhov

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov was born on 24 May 1905 in southern Russia, where the Don Cossacks lived and fought. His great subject became their fate across the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, the civil war that followed, and the brutal collectivization that came after. And Quiet Flows the Don, his most famous novel, traced those years in detail and brought him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent his career writing about a world being ground to pieces by history. Sholokhov died on 21 February 1984.