Николай Шундик Nikolai Eliseevich Shundik. Soviet writer, editor-in-chief of the Volga magazine, director of the Sovremennik publishing house. His first story "The Death of the Stone Devil" was published in 1949 in the "Smena" magazine. In 1952, after graduating from the Khabarovsk Pedagogical Institute, he remained to teach at one of the Khabarovsk schools. At the same time he released his first major work - the story "In the Far North", for which he received the first prize at the competition of the Ministry of Education of the RSFSR for the best children's book. A year later, Shundik published the novel The Swift Deer, which gained popularity among readers and was subsequently republished in 27 countries. The subject of the work is devoted to life in the Far North - the traditional life of reindeer herders and hunters and the formation of Soviet power in Chukotka. He graduated from the Higher Literary Courses in 1957 and settled in Ryazan, where he lived until 1965, heading the local organization of the Writers' Union. In 1959 he published the novel "A Spring at a Birch", written in Ryazan material. In the same period, a "Ryazan experiment" was taking place in the region to triple the production of livestock products, which turned out to be a gamble and ended with the deprivation of the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and suicide of the first secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU A. N. Larionov. Later, this dramatic story formed the basis of the novel In the land of the blue-eyed. In 1965 Shundik became the head of the Volga magazine in Saratov, becoming its first editor-in-chief. In 1976, after becoming the working secretary of the Writers' Union of Russia, he moved to Moscow. In 1979-1981 he headed the Sovremennik publishing house. In 1979, the novel "White Shaman" was published, in which the author again turned to the Chukchi theme and the period of the 1930s-40s. The book was a noticeable success with readers and was filmed in 1982 by director A.D. Nitochkin. In 1982 Nikolai Shundik published his fifth novel, The Ancient Sign. The last novel of the writer was the book A Candle in the Wind, published in 1994 in the Sever magazine.
