Omon Matjon

Omon Matjon (born Omon Matchonov) was born on 14 February 1943 in the village of Bog'olon in the Khorezm Region, now part of Yangibozor District. He wrote verse from his first school years, and his first poem appeared in the district newspaper in 1958. In 1969 he graduated from the philology faculty of Samarkand State University.

He then moved to Tashkent and from 1969 to 1985 worked at the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art, first as an editor and later as head of a department. From 1985 to 1991 he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Yoshlik. After independence he served as a senior official in the Office of the President of Uzbekistan (1991–1994) and as deputy chairman of the State Press Committee (1994–1999), and directed the Cho'lpon publishing house (1999–2001). From 2001 he was editor-in-chief of the children's magazine Gulxan.

His poems appeared regularly in print from the mid-1960s, and his first collection, “Open Windows”, came out in 1970. It was followed by “The Caravan Bell” (1973), “The Sundial” (1974), “The Burning Tree”, “The Wounded Lightning”, “I Love You” (1981), “The Book of Trees and Herbs” (1984), “Just One Apple Between Us” (1990), “A Man's Shadow Fell on the Sun” (1991), “The Birds' Way” (1993) and “The Light of Faith” (1994). He brought the vocabulary and melody of the Khorezm dialect into Uzbek poetry and readily used epic devices in his lyric verse.

Longer forms hold a notable place in his work. “The Cry of the Haqqush” (1979) is made up of forty poems based on Khorezm folk legends. He devoted the dramatic poems “Pahlavon Mahmud” (1975) and “Beruni” (1977) to famous natives of Khorezm, and wrote “A Thousand and One Rays” (1982) after the model of Alisher Navoi's Khamsa. His verse novella “Time to Talk” (1986), which portrays the contradictions of Soviet life in the years before independence, won him the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1989.

In 2000 he published “Ardakhiva”, written for the 2,700th anniversary of the Avesta, and in 2002 a book on the Sufi sheikh Khoja Ahrar; later books dealt with Najm al-Din Kubra and Turabek Khanum. He translated Schiller, Baudelaire, Petőfi, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Rasul Gamzatov, Justinas Marcinkevičius and Berdi Kerbabayev into Uzbek. In 1980 the singer Ortiq Otajonov set his poem “Umr o'tar” (“Life Passes”) to music, and it became one of the singer's best-known songs.

Omon Matjon was named People's Poet of Uzbekistan in 1993. He died in Tashkent on the night of 28–29 October 2020, aged 77. In 2021, for the 30th anniversary of independence, he was posthumously awarded the Order of Labour Glory (Mehnat shuhrati).