Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970, announced October 8, 1970. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: born 1918, Kislovodsk, Russia. Wiki link Data: the Nobel Foundation (CC0).