Quddus Muhammadiy

Quddus Muhammadiy (born Quddus Mukhamedov) was born on 25 October 1907 in Tashkent into a peasant family. Orphaned early, he grew up in a children’s home. He graduated from an agricultural technical school in 1930, having worked as a trainee technician at a plant-breeding station while he studied. He then studied at the biology faculty of the Central Asian State University in 1931–1932 and at the Tashkent Medical Institute in 1932–1937. From 1930 he taught at school, and for many years he was a teacher of natural science and biology.

His poems appeared in print from 1928 under the pen name “Quddus”. The first were published in the newspaper “Sharq haqiqati” and the magazine “Yer yuzi”; later he wrote mostly for the children’s and youth papers “Lenin uchquni” and “Yosh leninchi”. In the satirical narrative poems “The Sandal and the Stove” and “Self-Criticism” (1936–1937) he set old ways of life against new ones and gently mocked human, and especially children’s, failings.

During the war years, 1941–1945, he lived in Narpay District of the Samarkand Region as secretary and literary assistant to the celebrated bakhshi Islam Shoir Nazar ugli, writing down his termas and dastans. The work brought him close to oral folk poetry, whose tones remained audible in his own verse.

His first book, “A Keepsake for the Pupil”, a collection about school life, came out in 1946. It was followed by “Poems and Tales” and “The Test” (1947), “Dream” (1948), “Forty Sons, Forty Daughters” (1951), “The Day You Were Born” (1952), “The New House” (1953), “The Beetle and the Mouse” (1955), “The Little Button” (1956), “Selected Works” (1957), “What Should I Become?” (1960), “Very Interesting, Very Beautiful” (1961), “A Mother’s and a Child’s Love” (1963), “Spread Out, Tablecloth!” (1970), “Grandfather Shepherd’s Song” (1979), “The Book and the Sun” (1986) and “I Will Tell You a Wise Thing” (1987) — more than thirty books in all. The five-book cycle “The ABC of Nature” (1974–1980) teaches children to love the nature of Uzbekistan and to keep its water and air clean.

The central figure of his poems is the working man: he tells children in an engaging way where bread, halva and silk come from, and shows a carpenter’s work as a small miracle. Closeness to folklore, pictures of his native land, humour and irony mark his writing. He also wrote essays on children’s literature, among them “For the Further Flourishing of Children’s Literature” (1961), “Let Us Study Children’s Literature” (1963) and “With Inspiration” (1967).

He translated works by Samuil Marshak, Sergey Mikhalkov, Agniya Barto and Korney Chukovsky into Uzbek. His own poems were translated into Russian by Marshak, Barto, Mikhalkov, Yelena Blaginina, Olga Vysotskaya and Naum Grebnev; a Russian collection, “The Silver Poplar”, was published in Moscow in 1982.

In 1957 he was named an Honoured Teacher of the Uzbek SSR. His book of poems “Winged Friends” won the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1970, and in 1982 he received the title of People’s Writer of the Uzbek SSR. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1951), the Order of the Badge of Honour (1959), the Order of Friendship of Peoples (1977) and the Order «Do'stlik» (1995).

Quddus Muhammadiy died in Tashkent on 22 June 1997. In 2007 the Uzbek post issued a stamp bearing his portrait. In 2025 he was posthumously awarded the Order «For Selfless Service» for his contribution to literature and culture.