Rauf Parfi

Rauf Parfi (born Tursunali Parfiyev) was born on 27 September 1943 into a peasant family in the village of Sho'ralisoy, Yangiyo'l District, Tashkent Region. His parents, Muhammad Amin Parfi and Sakina Isabek qizi, came from the village of Vodil in the Fergana Valley and had been forced to leave their home region during the Soviet repressions, settling in Sho'ralisoy. Rauf finished the upper grades at an evening school in Yangiyo'l while already working, and from 1960 to 1965 he studied in the journalism department of the philology faculty of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan).

His first poem was published in 1957. After university he worked at various times for the State Committee for Cinematography and as an editor at the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art and at the Yozuvchi publishing house. He also wrote several screenplays, none of which reached the screen.

His first book, “The Caravan Road”, appeared in 1968, followed by the collections “Echo” (1970), “Image” (1973), “Memory”, “Eyes” and “Return”. “The Tree of Patience” (1986) won the Hamid Olimjon Prize of the Writers' Union of Uzbekistan, and “Silence” came out in 1989. The recurring themes of his verse are personal freedom, the homeland, Turkestan and the unity of the Turkic peoples; scholars point to how precisely he captures shifts in the inner state of the lyric hero and to his close attention to the sound and colour of words. He also used the pen name O'zturk.

Parfi knew Turkish perfectly and translated a great deal. From Turkish he rendered Nazım Hikmet's epic “Human Landscapes from My Country” (published in 1982), and he also translated Byron's “Manfred” and works by Karlo Kaladze and Enver Selyamet into Uzbek. He won a competition held in Turkey for poets writing in Turkic languages and received the international Mahmud Kashgari Prize.

From the first years of independence his political views put him out of favour with the authorities, and his poems all but stopped appearing in print. Even so, in 1999 he was named People's Poet of Uzbekistan, after which his last book published in his lifetime, the collection “Repentance”, came out. In his final years he had no steady job and made a living by tracking down and selling rare books. Rauf Parfi died of heart disease in Tashkent on 28 March 2005, at the age of 61.

After his death the collection “The Last Farewell” (2006) was published, as was “Prisoner of Conscience” (2006) in Kyrgyzstan, followed later by the selections “Sakina” and “Memory of Turkestan”. Events planned in Tashkent for his 70th and 75th anniversaries were not permitted by the authorities, while his 80th anniversary in 2023 was widely marked by the literary community. In 2025 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Selfless Service” (Fidokorona xizmatlari uchun).