Celebrated Babi Yar poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko dies

Russian poet and dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b. 1932), best known for his epic poem about the Nazi massacre of Jews and prisoners at Babi Yar near Kiev, died on Saturday of heart failure.

The poet, who moved to the USA in the 1990s and taught at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, will be remembered for his focus on war atrocities and his denunciation of antisemitism.

Yevtushenko became the youngest member of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1952 with the publication of his first book The Prospects of the Future. He went on to write over 150 collections of poems and in 1963 was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Read Babi Yar (1961), later used by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No.13, in English here.