Description:
A Poet and Bin-Laden is a novel set in Central Asia at the turn of the twenty-first century against a swirling backdrop of Islamic fundamentalism in the Ferghana Valley and beyond.
Brief description: Hamid Ismailov (born 1954), an Uzbek journalist and writer, was forced to flee Uzbekistan for the United Kingdom in 1992, where he took a job with the BBC World Service.Although his works are banned in Uzbekistan, he has published dozens of books in Uzbek, Russian, French, German, Turkish and other languages. These include books of poetry (Sad ('Garden'), 1987; Pustynya ('Desert'), 1988), of visual poetry (Post Faustum, 1990; Kniga Otsutstvi, 1992, novels (Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, 1988; Le Vagabond Flamboyant, 1993; Hay-ibn-Yakzan, 2001; Hostage to Celestial Turks, 2003; Doroga k smerti bol'she chem smert' ('The Road To Death Is Bigger Than Death'), 2005), and many others.He has translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and other Western languages.Written before he left Uzbekistan, Ismailov's novel The Railway was the first to be translated into English. Published in 2006, it was translated by Robert Chandler, following a Russian edition which had been published in Moscow in 1997. His triptych of novels comprising Mbobo, Googling For Soul and Two Lost To Life have also been translated into English with the help of an Arts Council grant.Ismailov has been a Writer in Residence for the BBC World Service since April 2010.
Review Quotes:
'A complex mosaic of a novel, reflecting Central Asian turmoil and involving jihadists and post-Soviet dictators, young idealists and their power-hungry elders, ending with an account of the murderous conflicts within the family of the Great Moghuls of India. What do these have in common with the modern terrorism of Al-Quaeda and other such groups? The theme is surely the same: Islamic fratricide.' John Spurling, the acclaimed author of 'MacRune's Guevara' and 'A Book of Liszts'
A Poet and Bin-Laden is an extraordinary and important book, providing an unique perspective on vital questions. I appreciate the book's symphonic structure, its far-reaching, modern-epic-like chorus and its weave of fact and fiction and wonder. It's a fascinating and rich book. Jill Shoolman /US Archipelago
A few of us here have now had a chance to take a look at the pages of A Poet and Bin-Laden, which show the same intelligence, wit and deep political engagement so apparent in your short stories. Your work is clearly wonderful. David Halpern
'A Poet and Bin-Laden' draws us with elegance and sympathy into a landscape barely known. Using reportage and descriptions of real events and people, it traces the life of Belgi, a poet of Soviet Uzbekistan transformed by 9/11 into an Islamic fighter. Belgi is a character living in the borderlands between the actual and the imagined. Ismailov paints deftly the restless world of Central Asia in all its spectacular geography, hidden places and loneliness. Along the way, the book is too an insider's elegy for the vanished country of the USSR; to which all its citizens, like Belgi, can never return.
Andrew Bromfield's beautiful translation allows Belgi to jump off the page as lifelike as he is in the original Russian. Monica Whitlock, former BBC correspondent to Central Asia, author of the book 'Beyond the Oxus'
"A Poet and Bin-Laden is a timely attempt at penning the history of post-Soviet Uzbekistan, where the book has been banned, and at examining the roots of Islamism. It is also a hymn to human civilisation struggling to break through the barriers of violence and hatred." Anna Aslanyan/THE NATIONAL