Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (May 24, 1905 – February 21, 1984) was a Soviet novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the period of collectivization, primarily in his most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. The authorship of even his most famous texts has been widely disputed.