Leonid Tsypkin Author

Leonid Tsypkin was born in Minsk in 1926 to Russian-Jewish parents. After surviving both Stalin's terror and the upheavals of the Second World War, he graduated from medical school in 1947 to become a respected pathologist and medical researcher. Twice denied permission to leave the Soviet Union after his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to the United States, Tsypkin died in Moscow in 1982, at the age of 56.

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others and At the Same Time. She is also the author of four novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America, as well as a collection of stories and several plays. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, and received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.