O'tkir Hoshimov

O'tkir Hoshimov was born on 5 August 1941 in Doʻmbirobod, then a village on the edge of Tashkent and now part of the city’s Chilonzor district. His father, Ataulla Hoshimov, was a worker, and his mother, Hakima, knew a great deal of folk song and oral lore. His childhood fell in the hard years of the war and its aftermath. After leaving school in 1958 he studied in the journalism department of Tashkent State University, first by correspondence and then full-time, and graduated in 1964.

He started work in 1959 at the railway newspaper “Temiryoʻlchi” and went on to the newspapers “Qizil Oʻzbekiston” and “Toshkent haqiqati”. From 1966 to 1982 he headed a department of the evening paper “Toshkent oqshomi”, and from 1982 to 1985 he was deputy editor-in-chief of the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art. From 1985 to 1995 he was editor-in-chief of the literary journal “Sharq yulduzi”.

He entered literature with sketches and poems: a collection of sketches, “Steel Riders”, came out in 1962, and a year later the novella “Steppe Air” earned warm words from Abdulla Qahhor, whom Hoshimov regarded as the writer who influenced him most. The 1970s brought the novellas “Spring Will Not Return” (1970) and “Listen to Your Heart” (1973) and his first novel, “There Is Light and There Is Shadow” (1976).

“Worldly Affairs” (1982) is a novella made of stories held together by the figure of the author’s mother; he wrote its last chapters after her death in 1980, and the book won the Writers’ Union’s Oybek Prize. His novel “Between Two Doors” (1985), about people who lived through the war and the years after it, brought him the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1986 and was reprinted ten times. It was followed by the satirical novella “Two Times Two Is Five” (1987) and the novel “Lives Lived in a Dream” (1993), which ties together the purges of the 1930s, the Afghan war and the “Uzbek affair”.

As a playwright he wrote “Congratulations on the Wedding”, “Human Devotion”, “A Little from You, a Little from Us” and “Repression”, staged in theatres across the Central Asian republics; films were made from “Congratulations on the Wedding” and from the novella “Spring Will Not Return”. He translated Ernest Hemingway, Konstantin Simonov, Alexander Kuprin and Olga Bergholz into Uzbek. The short aphorisms he had jotted down in notebooks for forty years were published in 2001 as “Notes in the Margins of a Notebook”.

In March 1991 he was named People’s Writer of the Uzbek SSR. After independence he sat in the first and second convocations of the Oliy Majlis and chaired its Committee on Press and Information from 1995 to 2005. He was awarded the orders “Mehnat shuhrati” (1997) and “Buyuk xizmatlari uchun” (2001).

O'tkir Hoshimov died in Tashkent on 24 May 2013, aged 71. Under a presidential resolution of 2 December 2020 his 80th anniversary was marked in 2021: a memorial plaque on his house in the Doʻmbirobod neighbourhood, a Tashkent street bearing his name and a new edition of his selected works were ordered, and the Uzbek post issued a stamp in his honour. On 28 May 2026 he was posthumously awarded the order “El-yurt hurmati”.