Oles Gonchar was the author of some 20 novels, translated into every important European language, and a dedicated politician in his native Ukraine.

He was a deputy to the USSR Supreme Council for many years and chairman of the Board of the Union of Ukrainian Writers from 1959 to 1971. He promoted the Communist line in literature and campaigned energetically against fellow writers including Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was showered with privileges - cars, dachas, flats in Kiev and Moscow. He travelled abroad to court the Ukrainian emigre community, heading delegations of Ukrainian writers and promoting his work. His books were distributed in millions and forced on public libraries. His two-volume Selected Works was published in 1951, reprinted in Kiev in 1959-60 and again in Russia in 1966-67. Articles and books were devoted to him.

He was born Alexander Gonchar in 1918, in Poltava Province, the son of a peasant. Ukraine, under the central Ukrainian Rada (Council) government, was enveloped in the First World War; the civil war soon followed. Gonchar was four years old when Ukraine became a Soviet republic. As a teenager he witnessed the famine in his country, once a rich agricultural area, caused by enforced collectivisation. Aged 17, he went to Kharkov, the second largest Ukrainian city after Kiev, and enrolled in the School of Journalism, graduating in 1937. In 1938 he became a student at the Dnepropetrovsk University, but did not graduate until 1946. He volunteered for the front in June 1941, when the German armies invaded the Soviet Union.