Abdulla Sher

Abdulla Sherov, known in literature as Abdulla Sher, was born on 5 August 1943 in the village of Yoʻltushgan in the Chinoz district of the Tashkent region, into a family of craftsmen who worked in copper. He finished secondary school in 1960 and worked first as a primary-school teacher and then as a literary staff member of the district newspaper “Lenin bayrogʻi”. His first poem appeared in print in 1959.

From 1965 to 1970 he studied in the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University, now the National University of Uzbekistan. From 1969 he worked at the magazine “Guliston” as a literary staff member, department head and executive secretary, and at the newspaper “Oʻzbekiston fizkulturachisi”. In 1981 he completed the Higher Literary Courses in Moscow and became executive secretary of the magazine “Yoshlik”; later he served as deputy first secretary of the Writers’ Union and as executive secretary of its Tashkent region branch.

His first poetry collection, “Koʻklam tabassumi” (“The Smile of Spring”), came out in 1973. It was followed by “Alyor” (1977), “Atirgul soyasi” (“The Shadow of a Rose”, 1979), “Roz” (1980), “Kuz hiloli” (“The Autumn Crescent”, 1983), “Qadimgi kuy” (“An Ancient Melody”, 1987), “Nuqtadan soʻng” (“After the Full Stop”, 1989), “Toqat” (“Patience”, 1997), “Yonayotgan yoʻl” (“The Burning Road”, 2007), “Yomgʻirlar oralab” (“Through the Rains”, 2009), “Sarbast qoʻshiqlar” (“Free Songs”, 2010) and “Gul yillar, bulbul yillar” (“Years of Flowers, Years of Nightingales”, 2012), as well as a prose collection, “Asrlarning asraganlari”. His poems have been translated into Russian, Lithuanian, English, Spanish, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Kazakh and Crimean Tatar.

He also worked as a translator. From German he rendered Byron’s “Don Juan” and Heine’s “Book of Songs” into Uzbek, and from Russian poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Akhmatova, Charents and Tvardovsky.

He has belonged to the Creative Union of Journalists of Uzbekistan since 1975 and to the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan since 1977. From 1989 to 2011 he taught in the department of ethics and aesthetics at the philosophy faculty of the National University of Uzbekistan, as senior lecturer, associate professor and head of the department, and he wrote study guides and textbooks on ethics and aesthetics.

In 2000 he received the badge “Excellent Student of Higher Education”. In 2023, under a presidential decree issued for the thirty-second anniversary of independence, he was given the honorary title People’s Poet of Uzbekistan; his eightieth birthday was widely marked that year.