Tolepbergen Qayipbergenov

Tolepbergen Qayipbergenov was born on 7 May 1929 in the village of Shortanbay in the Kegeyli district of Karakalpakstan, into a peasant family. He graduated from the Khojeyli teacher-training school in 1947 and taught in his home village, then in 1955 finished the Russian language and literature faculty of the Karakalpak State Pedagogical Institute.

After the institute he worked on the literary magazine “Amudarya” and at Karakalpak radio, then served as executive secretary of the writers’ society, deputy head of the radio committee, editor of the newspaper “Jas Leninshi” and director of the Karakalpak state publishing house. From 1967 to 1980 he held senior posts in the State Committee for Press, Printing and the Book Trade under the Council of Ministers of the Karakalpak ASSR.

He came to literature through poetry: his first poem, “Tilegim”, appeared in “Jas Leninshi” in 1951, and his first novella, “The Secretary”, followed in 1956. After that he wrote mostly prose, including the novellas “Thank You, Teacher”, “The Ice Drop” and “Sleepless Nights” and the two-book novel “Daughter of the Karakalpak” (1963–1965), on which Uzbekfilm based the 1981 film “Unconquered”. He received the Karakalpak ASSR’s Berdaq State Prize in 1967 and the Uzbek SSR’s Hamza State Prize in 1971 for “Thank You, Teacher”.

His trilogy “The Karakalpak Dastan” (“The Legend of Mamanbiy”, “The Unfortunate”, “The Lost Ones”), set in the 17th–18th-century history of the Karakalpaks, won the USSR State Prize in 1986. Later books turned to the Aral Sea disaster, ecology and the kinship of Turkic peoples; the novel-essay “Karakalpaknama” earned him the international Mahmud Kashgari Prize in 1995, and the book “Letters to Grandfather in the Other World” the international Mikhail Sholokhov Prize in 2004. About a hundred of his books were published in Karakalpak, Uzbek, Russian, Turkish and other languages.

In 1980 he was elected chairman of the Karakalpakstan Writers’ Union and led it until his death; the same year he became deputy chairman of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan. He was deputy chairman of the Supreme Council of Karakalpakstan from 1987, a People’s Deputy of the USSR in 1989–1991, and from 1995 chairman of the board of the Assembly of Cultures of the Peoples of Central Asia Foundation; he was repeatedly elected to the Jokargy Kenes and the Nukus city council.

He was named People’s Writer of the Karakalpak ASSR in 1974 and People’s Writer of Uzbekistan in 1993, and became Hero of Uzbekistan in 2003. He also held the Order of the Badge of Honour, the Order of Friendship (Do‘stlik), the Order El-yurt Hurmati and the Shuhrat Medal, and was an honorary citizen of Naberezhnye Chelny (Russia) and Kyzylorda (Kazakhstan). He died on 14 September 2010.