Mirpulat Mirzo

Mirpulat Mirzo was born on 20 August 1949 in the village of Sayram in the Chimkent region of the Kazakh SSR. After finishing school in the village he entered the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan) in 1967 and graduated in 1971.

He began writing poetry as a student: a first group of poems appeared in the magazine “Guliston” in 1971 and his first book of verse in 1975. He started work the same year at the publisher now called Yangi Asr Avlodi, then served as a literary adviser and secretary of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan and as editor-in-chief of the Yozuvchi publishing house.

From 1997 he was for many years deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine “Jahon adabiyoti” (World Literature). His collections of verse include “The Season of Love”, “Good Days”, “The Blue River” and “Roses and Stars”; after independence came “Selected Poems” (2004), “Delight” (2009) and “The Scent of Basil” (2011).

Mirzo was also an active translator. He rendered Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into Uzbek, and both were staged at the Uzbek National Academic Drama Theatre. He also compiled or translated anthologies of world poetry (“Flowers of the Milky Way”, 2004), Kazakh poetry (“Sing, My Dombra”, 2005) and twentieth-century Russian poetry (2010).

He was a laureate of Russia’s Pasternak Prize (1998) and of Kazakhstan’s international Alash Prize (2001) and held the title of Honoured Cultural Worker of Uzbekistan. Mirpulat Mirzo died in Tashkent in February 2018, on 21 February according to the obituary on Kun.uz (some sources give 22 February).