Usmon Azim

Usmon Azim (real name Usmonqul Azimov) was born on 13 August 1950 in the village of Gaza in the Boysun district of the Surkhandarya region. He went to primary school in his home district and in 1972 graduated from the journalism faculty of Tashkent State University (today the National University of Uzbekistan).

From 1976 to 1989 he worked at Uzbek republican radio as an editor, senior editor and deputy editor-in-chief. In 1989–1990 he was executive secretary of the Tashkent regional branch of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan, and in 1991–1994 he served in the Office of the President of Uzbekistan as a sector head, leading consultant and state adviser. Since 2003 he has headed the literary department of the Uzbek National Academic Drama Theatre.

His first book of poems, “Insonni tushunish” (“Understanding Man”), appeared in the late 1970s. It was followed by the collections “Holat” (1979), “Koʻzgu” (1983), “Ikkinchi aprel” (1987), “Baxshiyona” (1989), “Uygʻonish azobi” (1991), “Gʻussa” (1994), “Saylanma” (1995) and “Kuz” (2001), and by the prose collection “Jodu” (2003). In 1982 he received the Mayakovsky State Prize of Georgia.

In the 1990s he turned seriously to drama: after several radio plays he wrote “Bir qadam yoʻl”, “Kunduzsiz kechalar”, “Bozor”, “Alpomishning qaytishi” and “Oʻtgan zamon hangomalari”, many of them staged at the Uzbek National Academic Drama Theatre. He wrote the screenplays of the film-tale “Alisher Navoi” (1990), the film-epic “Alpomish” (1997), the film “Sevgi” (“Love”, 1998) and the two-part film “Alpomish” (2000).

He translated poems by Paul Éluard, Vaciētis, Doğlarja, Voznesensky, Marcinkevičius and other poets into Uzbek. His own poems have been translated into English, French, German, Polish, Russian, Georgian, Turkish, Tajik, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and other languages, and many have been set to music.

In 2000 he was given the title People’s Poet of Uzbekistan. He has also received the Order of Friendship (1998), the Order “El-yurt hurmati” (2020) and the Order “For Selfless Service” (2026).