Yuri Drobyshev was born in Leningrad, and graduated from the Naval Engineering Academy. He left the Soviet Navy when he was 27, and became involved in translating and editing technical, popular science and science fiction works. He was a member of the Soviet Journalists’ Union, emigrating to Britain in 1978. He contributed to the anthology The Poetry of Perestroika (Iron Press, 1989), with work by Brodsky, Yevtushenko, Prigov and others, to Irina Ratushinskaya’s collection, Pencil Letter (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), to Evgeny Rein's Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2001), and to the children’s anthology, Sheep Don’t Go to School (Bloodaxe, 1998). He died in 2015.
