Ashurali Jo'rayev

Ashurali Ochilovich Jo'rayev was born on 8 August 1956 in the village of Jaloyir in the Karmana district of the Navoiy region. After school he worked at the Tashselmash plant and in 1974–1978 studied at the Tashkent State Institute of Culture named after Abdulla Qodiriy (today the State Institute of Arts and Culture of Uzbekistan).

From 1976 he worked as a tutor and then as a teacher and production-training instructor at the evening department of a technical college in Tashkent, until 1983. That year he joined the newspaper “O'zbekiston adabiyoti va san'ati” (“Literature and Art of Uzbekistan”), where he stayed until 1996 and headed the arts department. In the paper he wrote on pressing public problems: the critical column “Letters to My Fellow Villagers” described the everyday troubles of country people, and some of them were solved as a result, while “Teleanketa” took aim at poor television programmes.

His first book, the story collection “The Tortoise Race” (Toshbaqalar poygasi), came out in 1986. In 1989 he published the povest “Storms of the Heart” (Yurak bo'ronlari) about the singer Botir Zokirov; he expanded and reworked it into an educational novel issued in 2024, and a Russian edition was printed in Moscow in 2026. He also wrote a memoir essay on the novelist Odil Yoqubov and an essay on the singer Otajon Xudoyshukurov. His writing ranges over stories, povests, feuilleton povests, sketches, essays and very short stories.

After 1996 he worked in the apparatus of the President of Uzbekistan, was editor-in-chief of the magazines “Mushtum” and “Gulxan”, and deputy director general of the “O'zbekiston” publishing house. Mushtum is a satirical magazine founded in 1923 by Abdulla Qodiriy.

He now teaches at the State Institute of Arts and Culture of Uzbekistan and is a member of the Writers' Union of Uzbekistan. He received the Youth Union prize in 1990, the title Honoured Journalist of Uzbekistan in 1999 and the Botir Zokirov national prize for variety art in 2025, and was awarded the Order of Labor Glory (Mehnat shuhrati) by a presidential decree of 28 May 2026. In September 2026 the institute held a scholarly and literary event for his 70th birthday.