Isajon Sulton

Isajon Sulton (full name Isajon Abduraimovich Sultonov) was born on 6 April 1967 in the village of Avazboy in the Rishton district of the Fergana region. He entered the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan) in 1985 and graduated in 1990.

He came into literature in that same year with the novella “Munojot” (“Prayer”), published by the Cho‘lpon publishing house. Five years later the G‘afur G‘ulom publishing house issued “Oydinbuloq”, a book of a novel and stories. He later became a member of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan.

His stories have appeared in the journal Sharq Yulduzi and in foreign periodicals, among them Druzhba Narodov (Russia), Russkoye Pole (Moldova), Leksikon (USA) and Kurgan Edebiyat (Turkey). His stories “Oydinbuloq” and “The Bowl in the Water” were included in an anthology of twentieth-century Uzbek prose.

The novel “Boqiy darbadar” (“The Eternal Wanderer”) came out in Sharq Yulduzi in 2010 and as a separate book in 2011; Christopher James Fort translated it into English, and it was published in the United States by Mazda Publishers in 2019. The novel “Ozod” received the Writers’ Union prize in 2012. For the collection “Bog‘i Eram” (“The Garden of Eram”, 2015) he won a prize in a competition run by the Turkish magazine Güncel Sanat.

In 2014 a presidential decree gave him the title Honoured Worker of Culture of Uzbekistan. In recent years he has turned to historical subjects: “Hazrati Hizr izidan” (2018), “Bilga xoqon” (in a journal in 2019, as a book in 2022) and “Alisher Navoiy” (2021). The last took first place in the “Work of the Year” competition in 2021.

On 24 August 2021, ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of independence, a presidential decree made him People’s Writer of Uzbekistan. On 29 September 2022 he received the Turkic World Literature Prize (novel category) in Bursa, Turkey. He lives and works in Tashkent.