Yuliy Kim is a well-known Russian poet, composer, bard, dramatist, and scriptwriter. He is the author of about five hundred songs (many of them appearing in feature films and play productions), thirty plays and ten books.

Yuliy Chersanovich Kim was born on December 23, 1936 in Moscow. After the arrest of his parents he left the capital in 1938 for sixteen years, which he spent in Kaluga region and in Turkmenistan. In 1954 he returned to Moscow.

He graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow State Teachers’ Training University (1959), was assigned to work as a teacher in Kamchatka for five years, and later taught history and social science at Moscow schools (including School 8 attached to the Lomonosov Moscow State University).

In those years already Yuliy Kim started writing and playing with the pupils his author’s song compositions with interludes and vocal scenes, the performances having all elements of the musical.

In 1965 - 1968 Yuliy Kim became one of the activists of human rights movement. In 1968 he had to part with school forever because of his school authorities that were afraid to have something to do with a dissident. Since then Yuliy Kim has been a free artist.

In 1968 he went into professional composing of songs and writing of plays for theatre and cinema. Being a participant of the dissident movement, for a long time he appeared in the film titles and play bills under the penname of Yuriy Mikhailov, because the surname “Kim” sounded like sedition to censors. Most of Yuliy Kim’s songs are set to his own music, and lots of them were created in co-authorship with the composers Gennady Gladkov, Vladimir Dashkevich, and Alexei Rybnikov.

Today the discography of Yuliy Kim counts over 20 titles of CDs, audio and video tapes with his songs recorded. His songs have been included into almost all anthologies of author’s song, as well as into many anthologies of modern Russian poetry.

Since 1998 the poet has lived in Jerusalem and Moscow by turns.