Poetess. She created several well received collections of verse which often dealt with the mundane events of everyday life while trying to avoid the political difficulties of writing in the Soviet Union. Born Izabella Akhatovna Akhmadulina, she was raised initially in Moscow then lived with her family in Kazan during World War II; starting to write at an early age, she saw some of her poems published while still a teenager. Bella, as she was commonly known, studied at Moscow’s Gorky Literary Institute and quickly found difficulties by trying to avoid political themes (expelled in 1959 for refusing to help persecute Boris Pasternak, she was readmitted the next year), but was still able to join the Writer’s Union and to publish her first collection, “The String”, in 1962. She continued to produce a succession of works includimg “The Chill” (1968), the 1969 “Music Lessons”, and 1983’s “The Secret”. Always a defender of those in trouble with the state, she found problems herself in 1979 for contributing a short story to Vasily Aksyonov’s “Metropol”. Finally able to receive her artistic due as the Soviet empire started to crumble, she received the State Prize of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Pushkin Award in 1994, and the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2004. Her literary output was ongoing as she produced further volumes including “Casket and Key” (1994) and the 1996 “One Day in December”, and saw her verses translated into multiple languages. Bella was married around four or five times, first to poet Yevgeny Yevtushinko while in her teens and lastly to Bolshoi set designer Boris Messerer from 1974 until her death from a heart attack. Of choosing writing as a profession she said: “There is only one honorable reason for writing poetry-you can’t do without it”. (bio by: Bob Hufford)  Family links:  Parents:  Akhat Valeevich Akhmadulin (1902 – 1979)  Spouse:  Yuri Markovich Nagibin (1920 – 1994)* *Calculated relationship