Kavsar Turdiyeva

Kavsar Turdiyeva was born in Tashkent on 6 August 1958. In 1975 she finished School No. 201 in the Chilanzar district with a gold medal and entered the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University (today the National University of Uzbekistan), then continued her studies at Leningrad State University, where she qualified as a journalist in 1981. She later did postgraduate work at the Alisher Navoi Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan and in 1994 defended a candidate’s dissertation on questions of morality in modern Uzbek children’s poetry, becoming a Candidate of Philological Sciences.

Her first poem appeared while she was still at school, in the newspaper “Tong yulduzi”. Her first book, “Varrak”, came out in 1983. It was followed by “I Play, I Think” (1987), “The Mother Who Flew Away as a Bird” (1994), “A Journey Through Numbers” (2002) and the poetry collections “Botu’s Call” (2004), “The Little Puppeteer” (2007), “A Journey into the Merry World of the Alphabet” (2008), “At the Stop Strewn with Longing” (2011) and “Save the World, Children” (2012). She is a member of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan.

She began her working life as a lecturer at the Tashkent Pediatric Medical Institute and has headed its Uzbek language department since 2 September 1997 (a 2019 decree calls it the department of Uzbek, Russian and Latin). For medical students taught in Russian she wrote the textbook “Uzbek Language” (2006–2007) and the Russian-language manual “30 Steps to the Russian Language” (2010).

She has also worked in children’s drama: her play “In the Land of Stones” was staged by the Samarkand puppet theatre. She wrote many scripts for the humorous film magazine “Zumrasha” (1997–2001), is the author of more than two hundred song texts, and translated works by Korney Chukovsky, Samuil Marshak, Lev Barbas and Rustam Farhodiy into Uzbek.

In 2001 she was awarded the Shuhrat Medal for her literary and public work. In 2009 she won the literature category of the contest “The Greatest, the Dearest”, and in 2010 she took the nomination “Children’s Favourite Poetess”. By presidential decree of 28 August 2019 she was given the honorary title Honoured Youth Mentor of the Republic of Uzbekistan.