Vilyam Aleksandrov

Vilyam Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov was born on 24 March 1927 in Kharkiv and spent his childhood in Odesa. He wrote in Russian; in Soviet times he was known as a prose writer from Uzbekistan, and later took part in the literary life of Israel.

During the war he was evacuated to Uzbekistan as a teenager. He worked as an electrician at a silk factory in Kokand and then at several plants in the Urals. After the war he studied at the Tashkent industrial technical school, worked at a design institute, and then graduated from the philology faculty of Tashkent State University.

Aleksandrov worked for newspapers, for the magazine “Zvezda Vostoka” and for publishing houses. He began to publish in 1950. He was a member of the USSR Writers’ Union and held the title of Honoured Worker of Culture of the Uzbek SSR.

In his lifetime he brought out more than twenty books: the trilogy “Time of Losses, Time of Hopes”, novels and novellas such as “The Death of a President”, “To Touch Lightning” and “Yashka”, and collections of stories. He also turned to science fiction, with the novella “Alpha Centauri” (1972) and the book “Planet MIF” (1975). His works were staged, filmed and translated into other languages.

For the novel “To Touch Lightning” (1983) Aleksandrov became a laureate of the republican competition for the best prose work in 1984. From 1996 he lived in Israel and sat on the editorial board of the journal “Literary Jerusalem”. Vilyam Aleksandrov died in Jerusalem on 6 May 2009.