Pushkin House and Natasha Rulyova are pleased to invite you to an online interview with the award-winning Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov. This will be the next event in our series of conversations with authors of Russophone literature. The event will be held in English.
Photo by Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship
On 5 May 1954, Hamid Ismailov was born into an Uzbek family living in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. He was educated in a Soviet secondary school and military college. Later he attained university degrees in a number of disciplines. However, his calling was literature. He recalls having to read classical poetry and One Thousand and One Nights to his grandmother who brought him up from the age of 12, after his mother passed away. Even though he hated reading old tales to his granny when he was young, the ‘seeds of literature’ were planted during his formative years and they flourished when he was in his thirties and returned to classics in his literary pursuits, he told The National in an interview.
As an adult, Ismailov lived in Tashkent and then in Moscow, where he championed Uzbek literature for the Writers' Union. He translated Uzbek classics and works from Farsi into Russian, and also Western and Russian classics into Uzbek. He wrote poetry that was "too decadent, not upbeat enough to be published”. In 1992, he was forced to flee Uzbekistan because the government branded his writings as having “unacceptably democratic tendencies.” Since then he has lived in exile in the West. For 25 years, he worked at the BBC, first as Central Asia correspondent, and in 2010 he was appointed as the BBC World Service’s first Writer in Residence for two years.
Hamid Ismailov is a prolific author, having published journalistic articles, short stories, several books of poetry and over a dozen novels – far too many to mention in this short biography. He has written in English, Russian and Uzbek. Having lived in many contrasting cultures, Ismailov chooses the language in which to write by thinking about his audience, his intended reader. However, in translation, his books have crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries to reach people across the globe.
His books written in Russian include Железная дорога (1997) (translated into English as The Railway by Robert Chandler, 2007), Вундеркинд Ержан (2011) (translated into English as The Dead Lake by Andrew Bromfield, 2014), and Мбобо (2009) (translated as The Underground by Carol Ermakova, 2015). The Dead Lake was longlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Among the books written in Uzbek, there is Jinlar basmi yoxud katta o'yin (2012), which was translated as The Devils' Dance by Donald Rayfield and John Farndon (2018). Their translation won the 2019 ERBD Literature Prize. Manaschi was his latest published novel translated into English by Donald Rayfield (2021). It is worth noting that Donald Rayfield learnt Uzbek to translate Hamid Ismailov’s works. However, Hamid’s other Uzbek novels were translated by other translators. For example, Gaia, Queen of Ants was translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega (2020).
Western critics have compared his books to the best of Russian classics, Sufi parables and works of Western postmodernism. Continent Magazine described him as having written one “of the best Russian novels of the 21st century.” In The Guardian review of Devil’s Dance, Phoebe Taplin sums up: “It’s Ivan Denisovich meets Scheherazade meets the Lannisters at a postmodern party.”
Join us for a conversation with Hamid Ismailov about his extraordinary life, intercultural experiences, multilingualism and his enigmatic literary masterpieces.
Dr Natalia (Natasha) Rulyova is Associate Professor in Russian at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests spread across the areas of Russian literature, translation studies, post-Soviet media culture and genre studies.