Azim Suyun

Azim Suyun (born Azimboy Alimovich Suyunov) was born on 22 February 1948 in Nakurt, a village in the Payariq district of the Samarkand Region, set among the Karatau ridge of the Nuratau mountains. He was brought up by his grandfather Suyun. His father, Olim, was an educated man, but as the son of a family persecuted as kulaks he had to work as a shepherd, and following him with the flocks the boy came to know the mountain landscape closely. His first poems and short articles appeared while he was still at school, in the children’s magazines Gulxan and G‘uncha and in district and regional newspapers.

He did his military service in 1969–1971 and then worked on building sites in Tashkent. He studied journalism in the evening department of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan), graduating in 1977. He was a literary staff member of the newspaper Toshkent Universiteti and, in 1973–1986, an editor at the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art.

His first book, “My Sky”, came out in 1978, the year he turned thirty. It was followed by the collections “The Blow” (1979), “The Fate of the Earth” (1981), “Imagination” (1984), “The Path of Light” (1986), “Distant Dawns” (1989) and “I Burn, I Love” (1992). His long poems “The Fate of the Earth”, “Uzbekistan”, “The Building, or the Night a Drop Became the Sea” and “The Uzbek State”, and the dramatic poem “The Sarbadars”, on the Sarbadar movement, hold a special place in his work. In 1991 “Uzbekistan” and a cycle of poems won him the first international Abdulhamid Cho‘lpon Prize.

He was also active in the press and public life: a literary consultant to the State Press Committee, executive secretary of the board of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan in 1987–1990, and a department editor at the newspaper Xalq So‘zi in 1990–1993. From 1993 to 2002 he was editor-in-chief of O‘zbekiston Ovozi and its Russian-language edition Golos Uzbekistana, and from February 2002 to 2013 editor-in-chief of Guliston magazine. In 1995–1999 he sat in the first convocation of the Oliy Majlis, elected from the Zomin constituency.

After independence he published “The Sarbadars” and “Those Dark Eyes of Yours” (1994), a volume of selected poems, “Selfhood” (1999), “Wisdom of the East” (2000), “Seasons of the Homeland” (2007), “Wonders of Love” (2009), “Where the Elecampane Grows” (2012), “What I Found in Navoiy” (2015) and “I Am of the Earth” (2020). “Selfhood” gathers articles, interviews, poems, stories and translations from different years. Suyun named his five-line verse vignettes qayirma and developed them as a genre of their own: “O Friend”, a book of five hundred of them, appeared in 2005, and prose qayirmas followed under the same title in 2014. Four volumes of a planned seven-volume edition of his selected works were published by the Ghafur Ghulam publishing house between 2009 and 2020. Ibrohim G‘afurov, Umarali Normatov and Abdulla Oripov wrote about his work.

His poems have been published in Turkish, English, Arabic, Russian, Kazakh, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Karakalpak, Tuvan and other languages; his Russian translators included Alexander Faynberg. He himself translated foreign poets into Uzbek. In 1992 he received a diploma from the Writers’ Union of Turkey, and he was a member of the World Congress of Poets. In 1997 he was awarded the title of Honoured Worker of Culture of Uzbekistan.

Azim Suyun died in Tashkent on 9 March 2020, aged 72.