Valentin Ovechkin

Valentin Vladimirovich Ovechkin (; 22 June 1904 – 27 January 1968) was a Soviet writer, playwright and journalist.

Early life Valentin was born in Taganrog, the son of an office employee. He studied at the Taganrog Technical School from 1913 to 1919. He began writing early, while he was still a member of the Komsomol. His first story Saveliev was published in the newspaper Bednota (The Poor) in 1927. Other early works appeared in provincial papers. He stopped writing for several years and worked as a chairman of an agricultural commune on the Don River, and later in Kuban. In 1934 he became a traveling correspondent

Ovechkin is also the author of the plays Nastia Kolosova (1949), To Meet the Wind (1958), Summer Showers (1959), and A Time to Reap (1960), as well as numerous sketches and essays. From 1963 he lived in Tashkent, where he worked on the autobiographical cycle Uninvented Sketches (published 1972), which he never finished.

English translations Greetings From The Front, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947. Collective Farm Sidelights: Short Stories, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954.