Shamshad Abdullaev

Shamshad Abdullaev was born on 1 November 1957 in Fergana. An ethnic Uzbek, he wrote exclusively in Russian throughout his life. He studied at the philology faculty of the Fergana Pedagogical Institute (1975–1979), specialising in Russian literature.

From 1991 to 1995 he headed the poetry section of the Tashkent magazine “Zvezda Vostoka”. His first publications date from the same period: a selection titled “Okraina” appeared in a 1987 anthology of young poets, and the book “Promezhutok” (“The Gap”) was published in St Petersburg by “Mitin zhurnal” in 1992. In the early 1990s he received the Andrei Bely Prize, one of the best-known independent literary awards in Russia.

Abdullaev is regarded as the founder of the “Fergana school”, a circle of Russian-language poets who use Russian as a medium of dialogue between cultures. He himself sought to set Central Asian and Western poetic traditions side by side without leaning on the Russian one.

Over the next three decades his books came out mostly in Russia: “Slow Summer” (1997), “Double Noon” (2000), “Fixed Surface” (2003), “Approaching the Outskirts” (2013), “Before the Terrain” (2017), “The Monotony of the Suburb” (2023), along with collections of prose and essays. He won the Znamya magazine prize for essay writing in 1998, the Russian Prize for poetry in 2006 and 2013, and a Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship in 2015. His prose book “The Other South” earned the Volga/NOS Prize in 2020.

He lived in Fergana and later in Almaty, where he died on 23 October 2024. English translations of his poems have appeared, among others, in “Words Without Borders”.