Tog'ay Murod

Tog'ay Murod (born Tog'aymurod Mengnorov) was born on 3 February 1948 in the village of Xo'jasoat in the Surxondaryo Region. At the time the village belonged to Denov District; since 1981 it has been part of Oltinsoy District, formed that year. After finishing the village school No. 43 in 1966, he entered the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan) and graduated in 1972.

He then worked as an editor at the republic's radio in 1972–1975, as a translator for the newspaper “O'zbekiston fizkulturachisi” in 1976–1978 and as a section editor at the magazine “Fan va turmush” in 1982–1984. In 1985–1987 he studied in Moscow on the Higher Literary Courses of the Literature Institute.

He began with short stories and sketches in newspapers and magazines. The work that made his name was the novella “The Stars Burn Forever”, printed in the magazine “Sharq yulduzi” in 1976 and issued in 1980 by the Ghafur Ghulam publishing house as the author's first book. It was followed by “The Evening the Horse Neighed” (1979), about the horseman Ziyodulla; “People Walking in the Moonlight” (1980), about Qoplon and Oymomo, a couple who wait all their lives for a child; and “The Song of Mother Earth” (1985), an ironic portrait of a writer cut off from his native soil. Drawn from village life in Surxondaryo, written in lively spoken Uzbek and close in tone to folk song, these novellas made him widely known, and “People Walking in the Moonlight” won him the Writers' Union's Oybek Prize.

Tog'ay Murod also translated: he put a play and short stories by Jack London into Uzbek, as well as the animal stories of the Canadian writer Ernest Thompson Seton, which came out in 1989 as the book “Yovvoyi yo'rg'a” (“The Wild Pacer”).

His major work is the novel “The Fields My Father Left” (“Otamdan qolgan dalalar”), written in 1986–1991. The magazine “Yoshlik” printed part of it in 1993, and the Sharq publishing house issued it in full in 1994. Through three generations — Jaloliddin Ketmon, his son Aqrab and his grandson Dehqonqul — the novel tells what the Uzbek peasant went through under colonial and Soviet rule: Dehqonqul spends his whole life in the cotton fields and is finally jailed in the “cotton affair”. The novel brought its author the Abdulla Qodiriy State Prize in 1994, and in 1997 the director Shuhrat Abbosov made a four-hour film of it under the same title.

In 1999 Tog'ay Murod was named People's Writer of Uzbekistan. His second novel, “In This World One Cannot Die” (2001), is an allegorical satire on former party leaders who wasted their lives believing in false slogans. According to his contemporaries, he spent long periods writing in Parkent, near Tashkent.

Tog'ay Murod died suddenly in Tashkent on 27 May 2003, aged 55, and was buried in the Chig'atoy cemetery. Two volumes of his selected works appeared after his death (2008, 2012), and his contemporaries' memories of him were collected in the book “Men qaytib kelaman” (“I Will Come Back”). In 2018 an evening of remembrance, “The Stars Burn Forever”, marked his 70th anniversary in Tashkent, and in 2024 the Alisher Navoi National Library of Uzbekistan held a literary evening devoted to his work.