Rahimjon Otayev

Rahimjon Otayev, who writes under the pen name Otauli, was born on 3 April 1949 in the village of Chipan in the Turkestan district of the Chimkent region of the Kazakh SSR, an area that today lies in Kazakhstan’s Turkistan Region. He was the third of nine children in a large family.

In 1973 he graduated from the philology faculty of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan). He began working as a school teacher, then served as a methodologist at the Ministry of Public Education and as a consulting editor at the republic’s press authority; some sources also mention a post as a researcher at the Alisher Navoi Institute of Language and Literature.

Since 1983 he has worked at the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan, first as consultant on criticism and literary studies and then as senior literary consultant; from 1992 he is named as the union’s executive secretary.

Otauli’s writing spans prose and journalism. His philosophical essay “The Sky Full of Stars” appeared in 1983 and a collection of novellas and stories, “Melodies of the Surnay”, in 1991. He later wrote prose epics (dostans): “Talisman (A Turkestan Epic)”, “The Envoy (Afandi Became Immortal)”, “The Ulus (A Friend of Farabi)” and “The Will of the Age”. Many of his stories, essays, journalistic and literary-critical articles have been published in newspapers and magazines.

He is also a translator. Into Uzbek he rendered the novella “Shurabad” by the Iranian writer Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh and a philosophical fable by Fazil Iskander from Russian, works by Mukhtar Magauin and Abish Kekilbayev from Kazakh, and works by Tolepbergen Kaipbergenov and Ollonazar Abdiev from Karakalpak.

In 1984 he received the annual prize of the magazine Sharq yulduzi for the article “The Most Enigmatic Feeling”, in 1995 the Writers’ Union’s Alp Jamol prize for “Talisman”, and in 2000 the “Shuhrat” medal.