Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich, also spelled Voynovich, is a Russian (formerly Soviet) writer and a dissident. He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Language and Literature.
Voinovich was born in Stalinabad, Tajik SSR, Soviet Union. Voinovich's father was a journalist of Serbian descent, his mother a professor of mathematics of Jewish descent. His ancestor, Ivo Vojnović, was a prominent writer from Dubrovnik.
At the outset of the Brezhnev stagnation period, Voinovich's writings stopped being published in the USSR, but became very popular in samizdat and in the West. In 1974, because of his writing and his participation in the human rights movement, Voinovich was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union. He and his family were forced to emigrate in 1980. He settled in Munich, West Germany and worked for Radio Liberty.
Mikhail Gorbachev restored his Soviet citizenship in 1990 and since then the writer spends most of his time in the new Russia.