Abdulla Oripov

Abdulla Oripov was born on 21 March 1941 in the village of Nekoʻz in the Koson district of the Qashqadaryo region. His father, Orifboy Ubaydulla oʻgʻli, chaired the local collective farm, and his mother, Turdixol, kept the house; of their eight children Abdulla was the youngest of four sons. In 1958 he finished school with a gold medal and entered the journalism department of the Faculty of Uzbek Philology at Tashkent State University, graduating with honours in 1963.

He began writing poetry as a student, and his first book, the collection “The Little Star” (“Mitti yulduz”), appeared in 1965. It was followed by “My Eyes Are on Your Road” (1967), “Dear Mother” (1969), “My Soul” (1971), “Uzbekistan” (1972), “Wonder” (1979) and others; between 1965 and 2015 he published some twenty-five books of poetry.

After university he worked as an editor at the Yosh Gvardiya publishing house, in 1967–1974 as an editor and then editor-in-chief at the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art, and then as a department head at the journal “Sharq yulduzi”. From 1976 he was a literary consultant to the Union of Writers of Uzbekistan, in 1983–1985 he edited the children’s magazine “Gulxan”, and from 1985 he was a secretary of the Union. In 1988 he was appointed head of the republic’s copyright protection committee.

Besides lyric verse he wrote longer works: the narrative poems “The Road to Paradise” (1978) and “The Sage and Death” (1980) and the verse drama “Sohibqiron” (1996) about Amir Timur. He won the Hamza and the Alisher Navoi State Prizes and was named People’s Poet of Uzbekistan. As a translator he brought into Uzbek the “Inferno” of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and poems by Nikolay Nekrasov, Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, Kaisyn Kuliev and Rasul Gamzatov.

Oripov wrote the words of the State Anthem of the Republic of Uzbekistan, set to music by Mutal Burhanov; the anthem was adopted on 10 December 1992 at the eleventh session of the Supreme Council. From 1996 to 2009 he chaired the Union of Writers of Uzbekistan. He sat in the Supreme Council from 1990, then in the first and second convocations of the Oliy Majlis, and from 2005 in the Senate. In 1998 he was made a Hero of Uzbekistan, and in 2000–2001 his selected works came out in four volumes.

In 2007 the World Intellectual Property Organization gave him its WIPO Creativity Award gold medal, and in 2015 he received the Italian Order of the Star of Italy. Abdulla Oripov died on 5 November 2016 in Houston, United States, where he had gone for treatment, aged 75, and was buried in Tashkent’s Chigʻatoy cemetery.

In 2017 a creative school named after him was founded in Qarshi, where a monument to the poet also stands; his statue is also in the Alley of Writers opened in Tashkent in 2020. In 2021 the Uzbek post issued a stamp bearing his portrait, and in 2023 the biographical feature film “Abdulla Oripov” was released.