15 November] 1915 – 28 August 1979), was a Soviet author, war poet, playwright and wartime correspondent,[3] arguably most famous for his 1941 poem "Wait for Me".

His father, Mikhail Agafangelovich Simonov, an officer in the Tsar's army, left Russia after the Revolution of 1917 and died in Poland sometime after 1921.

In 1919 his mother married Alexander Ivanishev, a Red Army officer and veteran of World War I. Konstantin spent several years as a child in Ryazan while his stepfather worked as an instructor at a local military school.

Simonov's first play, The History of One Love, was written in 1940, and performed on stage at the Memorial Lenin Komsomol Theater in Leningrad.

That same year he was impressed by Soviet resistance in this place, during which 39 German tanks have been destroyed in one day, and described this episode in The Living and the Dead trilogy.

At the beginning of World War II Simonov received a job with the official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.

As a war correspondent, Simonov served in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Germany, where he was present at the Battle of Berlin.

For three years after the war ended, Simonov served in foreign missions in Japan, the United States and China.