Khosiyat Bobomurodova

Khosiyat Bobomurodova was born on 2 May 1950 in the Xatirchi district (sources name the village of Oqravot and the Ibn Sino collective farm as her birthplace; the district is now part of the Navoiy region). Her father, Mulla Bobomurod, was an educated man and a gifted storyteller; from him the future poet first heard the names of Navoiy, Jomiy and Furqat and the tales of “One Thousand and One Nights” and “Chor darvesh”.

She finished secondary school in 1966 and entered the Tashkent State Pedagogical Institute, moving to the part-time department in 1967 because of hardship at home. From the age of seventeen she worked as a primary-school teacher, and from twenty-five as a school director. Her first poems appeared in the magazines “Guliston” and “Sharq yulduzi”.

In 1978 she joined a regional newspaper. In 1979 her first collection, “A Drop from the River”, was published, and that year she was admitted to the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan. Further books followed: “Trembling of the Heart” (1984), “My Cranes” (1984), “Letters to Samarkand” (1988), “Flowers I Picked” (1992), “The Castle of Wishes” (1997), as well as “The Master of My Soul” and “There Is Only One Motherland”, the play “A Woman with a Child in Her Arms” and works of journalism. She has published more than thirty books, and her work has been translated into Tajik, Russian, English and Chinese.

In 1983–1989 she was executive secretary of the Navoiy regional writers’ organisation, and in 1990–2003 of the Samarkand one; in 2003–2005 she directed the Zarafshon publishing house. She is now a professor at the Centre for Uzbek Language and Culture of Samarkand International University of Technology, where she teaches “Lessons of the Motherland”; she also wrote the words of the university’s anthem.

She has received the Shuhrat medal and the orders Mehnat shuhrati and El-yurt hurmati, and holds the titles Merited Cultural Worker of Uzbekistan and Excellent Worker of Public Education. A two-volume selection of her works was published for her seventieth birthday. In March 2026 a presidential decree conferred on her the honorary title People’s Poet of the Republic of Uzbekistan.