Zulfiya

Zulfiya (full name Zulfiya Isroilova) was born on 1 March 1915 in Tashkent into a craftsman’s family. Her mother, who knew many songs and tales by heart, gave her daughter a love of words. In 1931–1934 Zulfiya studied at a women’s teacher-training college, and in 1935 she began postgraduate studies at the Institute of Language and Literature under the Uzbek Committee of Sciences.

Her first poem was printed in the newspaper “Ishchi” in 1931, and in 1932, aged seventeen, she brought out her first collection, “Pages of Life”. It was followed by the books “Temiroy” (1934) and “Song of Girls” (1939). In 1935 she married the poet Hamid Olimjon; they had a daughter, Hulkar, and a son, Omon.

From 1938 she worked in publishing: as an editor at a publishing house for youth literature (1938–1940) and as head of a department at the State Publishing House of Uzbekistan (1941–1950). During the war her collections “They Called Him Farhod” (1943) and “In the Days of Separation” (1944) appeared. On 3 July 1944 Hamid Olimjon was killed in a car accident. In the poems written after his death — the collection “Hulkar” (1947) and the poem “Spring Has Come Asking for You” — she expressed, through her own grief, the pain of a people who had suffered heavy losses in the war.

After the party resolutions on art and literature of the late 1940s she was reproached for “pessimistic moods” and turned to poems on the themes of the day. From 1950 she worked at the magazine “O'zbekiston xotin-qizlari” (later “Saodat”), first as a department head and in 1954–1985 as its editor-in-chief; she joined the Communist Party in 1953. In her poems and articles she wrote about the lives of Uzbek women and defended their rights.

In the second half of the 1950s she took part in the movement of Asian and African writers, attending the Asian Writers’ Conference in Delhi in 1956 and the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference in Cairo in 1957. Her travels to India, Egypt and Japan are reflected in poems such as “Mushoira” and “My Son, There Will Never Be War”. The books “Thoughts” (1965), “Visol” (1972) and “Years, Years…” (1975), and the long poem “The Sunlit Pen” (1970), dedicated to the last journey of her mentor Oybek, opened the mature period of her work. For the long poem “Shards of Memory” (1974) and the cycle “Rainbow” she received the USSR State Prize in 1976.

Zulfiya devoted much of her life to studying and publishing the legacy of Hamid Olimjon: from his long poem she wrote the puppet play “Semurg'” (with S. Somova) and the libretto of the opera “Zaynab and Omon”. She translated Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Lesya Ukrainka, Mustai Karim and Amrita Pritam into Uzbek. She was People’s Poet of the Uzbek SSR (1965) and a Hero of Socialist Labour (1984), and received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR (1970) and the International Jawaharlal Nehru Prize (1968).

Zulfiya died in Tashkent on 1 August 1996 and was buried in the Chig'atoy cemetery. In 1999 the Zulfiya State Prize was established, awarded every year to gifted young women. A street in Tashkent bears her name; a monument to her was unveiled in the capital in 2008, and in 2017 the Hamid Olimjon and Zulfiya Museum opened in Jizzakh.