Vitaly Korotich

Vitaly Oleksiyovich Korotich (Ukrainian: Віталій Олексійович Коротич; 26 May 1936 – 30 September 2025) was a Soviet, Ukrainian and Russian writer and journalist.

Life and career

Korotich was born on 26 May 1936. He graduated from the Kyiv Medical University in 1959 and worked as a doctor between 1959 and 1966. Later, he became a full-time writer, and served as an officer of the Union of Soviet Writers.

In the late 1970s, Korotich became the editor of Vsesvit, a Ukrainian literary magazine in Kyiv specializing in publishing literary works translated from foreign languages. His magazine was described at the time as one "that probably prints more of the latest American fiction than any magazine in Moscow."

In 1976, Korotich spent three weeks as a writer-in-residence at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. In 1984, still the editor-in-chief of Vsesvit, he was in New York as a member of the Ukrainian SSR's delegation at the United Nations General Assembly. In 1985, he visited Canada as well, participating in a campaign for world peace and for nuclear disarmament.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Vitaly Korotich was editor-in-chief of Ogonyok magazine in Moscow, which made, some say, a substantial contribution to the promotion of media freedom in the former USSR. The Ogonyok magazine, at the time when Korotich was at its head, was regarded as a "megaphone" for the perestroika and glasnost policies of the last USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1992 Vitaly Korotich went to the U.S. and was a visiting professor of journalism at Boston University, also lecturing at Boston College on 19 October.

Korotich died on 30 September 2025, at the age of 89.