Our contemporary, a poet by the grace of God, now known worldwide, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was born at Zima station in the Irkutsk region in the family of geologist and amateur poet Alexander Gangnus. He published his first poem in the newspaper "Soviet Sport." His first book of poems "Scouts of the Future" was published in 1952, and in the same year he became the youngest member of the USSR Writers' Union. In 1963, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the author of more than 150 books, which have been translated into many languages.