Qambar Ota

Qambar Ota (real surname O‘tayev) was born in 1941 in the city of Kattaqo‘rg‘on in the Samarkand region. His childhood was spent on the Koson and Chiroqchi steppes, in the village of Bahrin in Urgut, along the Darg‘om canal, in the Pastdarg‘om district and in Kattaqo‘rg‘on. His first poem was printed in the Kattaqo‘rg‘on district newspaper while he was still at school; a fable, “Yong‘oq” (“The Walnut”), soon followed, and then poems in the Samarkand regional newspaper and the magazine “G‘uncha”.

He studied at a railway technical school in Samarkand and then at a water-management technical school, finished secondary education at an evening school, and in 1962 entered the Uzbek philology faculty of Samarkand State University, where he studied until 1967. He began working in 1967 as editor of the newspaper “Samarqand universiteti”, and then held a managerial post in the social sciences faculty of the Samarkand Agricultural Cooperative Institute.

In the mid-1970s he moved with his family to Tashkent and started work at the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art. He later held various posts at the magazine “O‘zbekiston agitatori”, the newspapers “Xalq so‘zi” and “Ma’rifat”, and the State Committee for Determining the Prospects of Uzbekistan.

Qambar Ota wrote more than twenty books of poems for children, among them “Chavandoz orzusi” (1985), “Shirin so‘z” (1988), “G‘ildirak” (1989), “Tabiatga rahmat” (1991), “Sizday yashagim kelar” (1994), “Bolalarning ko‘zlari” (1995), “Guldasta” (2001), “Alifbe bayrami” (2003), “Quyosh bilan gaplashdim” (2005) and “Tomda uxlagan bola” (2008). For adults he published “Vatan tuprog‘i” (1976), “Diydor” (1981), “Izlar” (1991) and “Dil ko‘rki” (2010), and he also wrote the narrative poems “Erka egizaklar” and “Bog‘bon hikoyasi”.

Nearly fifty of his poems were included in primary-school textbooks, extracurricular reading books and teaching aids for kindergartens; the textbook “Odobnoma” carries “O‘zbekiston – onajon”, and reading books carry “Bog‘da” and “Non qayerdan keladi?”. More than a hundred of his poems became songs. He translated Belarusian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian and Russian poets and other children’s poets from around the world into Uzbek, and his own poems have been translated into Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh, Karakalpak, Turkmen, Tajik and Uyghur.

For his contribution to the development of children’s literature he received the Order “For a Healthy Generation”, 2nd class, in 1999. Qambar Ota died on 31 July 2016, aged 75.