Latif Mahmudov

Latif Mahmudov was born on 1 July 1933 in the Mirobod neighbourhood of Tashkent, into a white-collar family. In 1951 he finished School No. 40, the railway school in Mirobod, and entered the journalism department of the Faculty of Philology at Central Asian State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan), graduating in 1956.

He began his working life at Republican Radio. When a chief editorial office for broadcasts to children and teenagers was set up in 1958, he was appointed its editor-in-chief and held the post for about twenty years, until 1978. From 1979 he headed the children’s literature department at the Yosh Gvardiya publishing house (now Yangi Asr Avlodi).

He started writing in 1956, mainly for children and teenagers: stories, novellas, plays and film scripts. More than thirty of his books have been published. The first, “Dear Eyes” and “Chinor”, appeared in 1961, followed by “Two Friends”, “The Hawk”, “The Secret of the Merry River”, “The Adventures of Two Lazybones”, “Brave Children”, “The Mysterious Letter”, “Secrets of the Old Dutar” and other collections, novellas and novels.

As a playwright he wrote “The Boy Carried Off by a Hawk”, “Ali-Vali”, “An Important Assignment” and “The Mysterious Letter”, which are staged in theatres for young audiences. Several films have been made from his works about children’s and teenagers’ lives, and his story “Woe to the Lazy One” was staged at the Uzbek Puppet Theatre. His books have been translated into Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Latvian, Estonian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Tajik.

His book “Tulips in the Mountains” received the Ghafur Ghulam prize of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan in 1984. In 1977 he was named Honoured Worker of Culture of the Uzbek SSR, and in 2000 he was awarded the Order “For a Healthy Generation”, 1st class. His book “Sevgi desam” came out in 2005.