Hamid Ghulam

Hamid Ghulam (real name Hamid Ubaydullayevich Ghulamov) was born on 25 April 1919 in Tashkent. He studied at the workers' faculty of the Central Asian Polytechnic Institute and then in the Russian language and literature department of the Tashkent Pedagogical Institute, graduating in 1941. His first poems appeared in print in the 1930s.

In the 1940s he was a literary staff member of the magazine Guliston, taught at a school and worked on the radio as an announcer and editor (1943–1944); from 1944 to 1954 he was head of a department and executive secretary of the newspaper Qizil O'zbekiston. His first poetry collection, “Qasosim bor”, came out in 1942, and later collections included “Qit'alar uyg'oq” (1960) and “Oshiq ko'ngil” (1974), along with several long poems.

In the mid-1950s he attended the Higher Literary Courses in Moscow, and in 1956–1958 he was the Literaturnaya gazeta's special correspondent for Uzbekistan. He turned to prose with the novella “Olmos qizi” (1956). His main novels are the two-volume “Mash'al” (1958–1961) on the establishment of Soviet power in Uzbekistan in the 1920s; “Senga intilaman” (1963) and “Binafsha atri” (1976) on the cultivation of virgin lands; “Toshkentliklar” (1967) on the labour of the city's people before and during the war; the revolutionary-themed “Mangulik” (1978); and “Mashrab”, about the life of the poet Boborahim Mashrab.

He also wrote for the stage: comedies and other plays for the musical theatre, among them “O'g'il uylantirish” (1963), “Toshbolta oshiq” (1965) and “Ajab savdolar” (1968), and the libretto of the opera “Xorazm qo'shig'i” (1964). Into Uzbek he translated Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Shevchenko and Gorky, and some episodes of the Shahnameh.

He held organizing posts as well: secretary of the board of the Writers' Union of Uzbekistan (1958–1965), editor-in-chief of the magazine Sharq yulduzi (1965–1971) and director of the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art (1971–1981).

He was an Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR (1969) and People's Writer of the Uzbek SSR (1979), and received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR (1974) and the USSR State Prize for the novel “Mangulik” (1980). He twice received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1959, 1979), and in independent Uzbekistan the orders “El-yurt hurmati” (1998) and “Mehnat shuhrati” (2004). He died on 21 August 2005; the 90th anniversary of his birth was widely marked in 2009.