Ikrom Otamurod

Ikrom Otamurod (his family name was Otamurodov) was born on 5 May 1951 in the Kasbi district of the Kashkadarya region. The announcement by the Writers’ Union names the village of Khojakasbi as his birthplace.

After school he studied at the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan) from 1969 to 1974. He began work in 1974 as an editor at the Oʻzbekiston Encyclopedia publishing house, and from 1975 until the end of his life he worked at the magazine Sharq yulduzi, first as a literary staff member and then as head of its poetry section.

His first collection of poems, “Colors of Time”, appeared in 1982, followed by “Birds of the South” (1983), “Endless Beyond the Horizons” (1987) and other books. In 1986 he wrote the dastan “Wounded Steeds of Hope”, dedicated to the Palestinian poet Muin Bseiso; literary reference works single it out as a notable event in Uzbek poetry of the 1980s.

In 1990 came the dastan “The Receding Pain”, which deals with faith, duty and humanity slipping away from people. In later years he published “Potsherds” (1994), “Inside and Outside” (1997), “Tavr” (2005), “Decline” (2008), “The Trial of Separation” and other collections.

Otamurod was also a translator: he put poems and long poems by Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Olzhas Suleimenov, Mahmoud Darwish and Muin Bseiso into Uzbek. His own works have been translated into Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Russian, Moldovan, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Georgian.

He received the Order of Friendship (“Do‘stlik”) in 1999 and the title of Honoured Worker of Culture of Uzbekistan. He died in Tashkent on 12 July 2026, aged 75; the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan announced his death.