Ismoil Tolak

Ismoil Tolak was born in 1947 in the village of Xonabek in the Andijan region. He finished secondary school at a boarding school in the village of Botaqora and then studied at the Andijan State Pedagogical Institute.

From 1971 to 1995 he worked at the institute where he had studied, and later taught at the Andijan State Institute of Languages; according to available accounts he also held a responsible post at the State Testing Centre under the Cabinet of Ministers of Uzbekistan.

He came into poetry with the collection “Thinking of You”, published in 1977. It was followed by “The Lark” (1983), “Green Breeze” (1989), “Scorching Heat” (1991), “The Dialect of Love” (1995) and “The Pass of Longing” (1997). In them the poet turns to faith, duty and conviction, to the beauty and the tragedies of the human soul. His cycle “Longing” is devoted to the inner world of Babur, with the poems spoken in Babur's voice.

Tolak was also a literary scholar: he defended a candidate's dissertation in 1981 and in 1994 a doctoral dissertation on the treatment of the age and the lyric hero in contemporary Uzbek lyric poetry, earning the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences.

He was among the first to study the work of Behbudiy and Cho'lpon, and published the scholarly studies “Luminous Destinations” (1992), “Uzbek Literature of the 20th Century” (1993), “Poetry Is the Flame of the Heart” (1994) and “Cho'lpon's Craft” (1997).

Ismoil Tolak died in 2003 at the age of 56 after a serious illness.