His Ukrainian father Iosif Yakovlevich Koval was a criminal investigator, while his mother Olga Dmitrievna Kolybina was a psychiatrist of Russian origin.
[2] In 1955 Yuri begun his studies at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, and in 1960, he graduated and started working as a drawing teacher in the countryside in the Republic of Tatarstan.
After a year, he returned to Moscow, working first as a schoolteacher and subsequently as an editor in the Detskaya Literatura magazine.
Later, he invested a lot of time promoting literary works of Shergin and Stepan Pisakhov, and even wrote a screenplay for animated films The Magic Ring (Russian: Волшебное кольцо) and Laughter and Grief by the White Sea, based on Shergin's fairy tales.
[3][5] In addition to his writing and screenwriting work, Yuri was also a professional sculptor, artist, icon painter, enameller and woodcarver.