About

More than just an Author

Igor’s Story

Igor Chirashnya was born in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, which he left when it was still one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. Back then, he thought communism was the only way to freedom and that all America, NATO, and their close partner, Israel, wanted was to impose a nuclear war on the world to rule it in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

His worldview changed in a single day in 1990 when he left his happy life and moved to Israel. Not seeing even a single blood-thirsty imperialist upon his landing, Igor realized that life is full of surprises and you shouldn’t blindly believe all you are told. Since then, he discovered that’s probably the only thing you can claim about life with certainty.

And so, looking back, he realized that his own life is definitely rather unpredictable.

He graduated from the Technion, Israeli Institute of Technology, worked as a programmer in a small software company, then spent several years in the IBM Research Lab in Haifa, where he managed a team of very (very!) smart people.

After a few years, while working in M-Systems, which was an inventor of a USB flash drive, and which was later acquired by Sandisk, a US-based company, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with his beautiful wife, Irina, and their one-year-old twins, Adam and Noya.

Little did they know that Irina was pregnant with another set of twins when Igor signed a relocation contract with Sandisk. And soon, when already in the States, Mika and Daniel were born. When people ask Igor about the probability of having two sets of twins, his standard answer is 100 percent.

Surviving alone with four children under two was somewhat challenging, but Irina and Igor were always optimistic about their life. Irina kept writing a daily blog, 6 Cherries, where she shared (in Russian) how humor and positivity kept them sane. Many people said that her blog helped them to survive too.

It was because of his family that he rediscovered his lifelong passion for fencing, a sport he practiced in his Soviet youth years.

Fast forward, and after founding several high-tech companies, some of which were successful and others that were fast to fail, Irina and Igor founded a fencing club, Academy of Fencing Masters, to create a unique sports academy for children and adults. Falling in love with the club concept and its ability to make hundreds of children happy through the sport of fencing, Igor left his tech career to focus exclusively on the club.

Soon thereafter, Igor discovered that he could combine his three passions: fencing, educating, and writing, and The Academy of Fencing Masters blog was born, which became one of the World’s most famous fencing blogs, a go-to resource for fencers, parents, and coaches.

Igor’s passion for writing developed in his childhood, when he wrote his first fiction while still in elementary school in Tashkent. It was a short story collection titled “Stories about Sasha.” This collection survived all these years until one day, opening a sealed molded box, he found these long-forgotten notebooks and carelessly put them in an upper drawer in a closet. Unfortunately, this drawer also hosted a tube of glue, and one day, after finishing their school project, one of his kids, unidentified to this day, put the tube back into the drawer, forgetting to close the cap. The glue spilled onto the notebooks, and now this piece of potential literature art would need to wait its day when the technology is advanced enough to unglue the pages.

In his youth, Igor also wrote stories for the state’s major newspaper for children, and he celebrated every time the editors returned their reviews and published these stories. His father kept all the newspaper clippings in his sacred folder for many years, but their destiny is now unknown.

Nurturing his knack for writing, Igor dreamed of writing a fiction book one day. Securing the unanimous support from his family, he dared to write his first novel, Breaking News of Tomorrow, published in May of 2023.

So, as you can see, life is full of surprises: with his chain of career changes (a high-tech executive, a business owner of a sports academy, a writer of fiction), Igor continues to look forward to what’s next.

One thing is certain: more books to come. If anything, Igor’s life taught him a plethora of interesting lessons and provided unbelievable experiences worth sharing on a page. Stay tuned.