Asqad Muxtor and “Chinor”

Asqad Muxtor was born on 23 December 1920 in Fergana in a railway worker’s family. When he turned 11 his father died, and he was raised in a children’s home until adulthood. In 1936 he studied at a journalists’ course in Tashkent, in 1938 entered Samarkand university, continued his studies in Tashkent during the war years, and then headed the literature department of the Andijan pedagogical institute for three years. From 1945 he worked in the press in Tashkent, and in 1960–1965 he was editor of the journal “Sharq yulduzi”. He began with poems such as “Tilak”, “Tong edi” and “Totli damlar”, wrote war-time poems such as “G‘alaba ishonchi”, and from the 1950s turned to prose, creating the novels “Opa-singillar”, “Tug‘ilish”, “Chinor” and “Amu”. He translated Sophocles’ tragedy “Shoh Edip” and works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tagore and others into Uzbek; he died in Tashkent on 17 April 1996.