Vladimir Gubaryev was born in 1938 in Mogilev, Russia. An engineer by training, he joined Pravda in 1976 as a science correspondent and then as science editor. He has written more than 20 books on space flight and the use of atomic energy including his unique survey of space travel, The Space Age. He has visited major scientific centers throughout the world and was the first journalist to cover controlled nuclear explosions, which he described in his book Two Paces from the Epicenter. He also scripted a number of documentary films and a feature film, The Ship of Newcomers, which was produced by the Gorky Studios in 1986. Gubaryev is the author of four plays. Two of these, Let's Go! and Special Flight, have been performed in several Soviet theaters. After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, he was the first journalist on the scene and the first to report on it in Pravda. He followed this series of articles with his play Sarcophagus, which he wrote in July 1986. Gubaryev is a member of the USSR Union of Writers and a winner of the USSR State Prize and of numerous other awards, including the Lenin Komsomol Prize.
