Vera Fyodorovna Panova (; – March 3, 1973) was a Soviet novelist, playwright, and journalist. She was a recipient of the Stalin Prize in 1947, 1948, and 1950. Early life Vera was born into the family of an impoverished merchant (later an accountant) in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Her father, Fyodor Ivanovich Panov, built canoes and yachts as a hobby, and founded two yachting clubs in Rostov. When she was five, her father drowned in the Don River. After her father's death, her mother worked as a saleswoman. As a girl, she was taught by a family friend, an old school teacher named Anna Prozorovskaya. Vera credited Anna with instilling in her a passion for reading. Anna died after being with Vera for only a year. Prior to the October Revolution she studied for 2 years at a private gymnasium, before her formal education was stopped because of money problems in her family. From her earliest years, Vera was an avid reader, especially of poetry, at which she tried her hand at an early age. Her reading included the works of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev. She also read numerous textbooks on science, geography, and history as a form of self-education. At the age of 17, she started working as a journalist on the Rostov newspaper Trudovoy Don (Working Don), publishing articles as V. Staroselskaya (the surname of her first husband Arseny Staroselsky whom she had married in 1925 and divorced 2 years later) and Vera Veltman. She described her first editing job and her first steps in this career in her novel Sentimental Romance (1958). She learned newspaper work by experience, serving in turn as an assistant to the district organizer of labor correspondents, a reporter, and an essayist. Career In 1933, she began writing plays. In 1935, her second husband, Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist Boris Vakhtin, was arrested and imprisoned on Solovki where he died (the exact death date is unknown, probably the later thirties). The Gulag authorities allowed her only one meeting with Boris, which she described in her story Svidanie (The Meeting). From 1940, she lived in Leningrad. The unexpected advance of the Nazis on the Leningrad Front found her in Tsarskoe Selo. She and her daughter were put in a concentration camp near Pskov, but they managed to escape to Narva, where they lived illegally in a destroyed synagogue. She then moved to the village of