Tohir Qahhor

Tohir Qahhor (Tahir Kahhar) is an Uzbek poet, translator, literary scholar and journalist. He was born on 9 May 1953 in the village of Mozor Qo'hna in the To'raqo'rg'on district of the Namangan region, into a family of office workers. His first poem was printed in 1968 in a district newspaper.

From 1970 to 1975 he studied at the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan). He then worked in the chief editorial office of literary and drama programmes at Uzbek Radio (1975–1979) and at the magazine Sharq yulduzi as a literary staff member and head of the prose section (1979–1991); during those years the magazine introduced its columns on episodes of national history and on world short fiction. From 1991 to 1997 he worked at the Ghafur Ghulam Literature and Art Publishing House.

His first scholarly article appeared in 1978 in the collection “The Art of Translation”. His poetry collections include “White Apricot” (1980), “The Flowing River” (1982), “Whose Is the Sky?” (1982), “A Knock at the Door” (1984), “The Eye of the Day” (1987), “The Stars Are My Garden” (1988) and “The Flight of the Mountain” (1990); a book of his poems in Russian, “Oko dnya”, came out in Moscow in 1990. His articles on independence were gathered in “For a Free Turkestan” (1994).

He is also a translator. Into Uzbek he rendered Gabriel García Márquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, works by the Turkish authors Ziya Gökalp, Nihal Atsız, Dündar Alp and Ismail Gasprinski, and ghazals of Hafez and Jami. He is among the compilers of an anthology of contemporary Uzbek poetry published in Turkey in 1995. In 2004 he defended a candidate’s dissertation on the study of Uzbek literature of the 1920s–1930s in Turkey. From 2005 to 2010 he taught at the international journalism faculty of the Uzbek State World Languages University, and from 2010 to 2012 he was a section editor at the journal Jahon adabiyoti.

In 1991 he was named Honoured Culture Worker of Uzbekistan; the same year he received the international Ahmad Yassawi prize of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan and the Targ’ibot (promotion) centre for his articles on independence. His poems have been translated into Azerbaijani, Ukrainian, English, Bulgarian and Turkish. He is a member of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan.