Zohidjon Obidov

Zohidjon Obidov was born in Tashkent in 1923. After finishing school he went to the front in the Second World War rather than to college, and was wounded in the fighting near Leningrad before returning home.

After the war he studied at Tashkent State University. Once he graduated he taught at the Namangan Pedagogical Institute and, in the same years, headed the writers’ organisation of the Namangan region.

Back in Tashkent he worked at the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan, at the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art and the Yosh Gvardiya publishing house, and on the satirical magazine “Mushtum”. In 1962 he edited “Quyosh uyg‘otganlar” (“Those Who Woke the Sun”), a collection of verse on Asia and Africa.

He wrote poetry from the 1950s and published more than twenty collections, the first being “Yaxshi niyat” (“Good Intention”, 1957); others include “The Sickle of the New Moon”, “Song of the Heart”, “Waves of Hope”, “Selected Works” (1974), “I Strive Toward You” and “Winged Songs” (1991). Some of his poems became songs, others were written in a humorous vein. He translated Lermontov, Shevchenko, Bazhan, Hamzatov and Mikhalkov into Uzbek.

A war veteran, he was given the title Honoured Worker of Culture of Uzbekistan. He died on 5 August 1996.