Googling for Soul

Hamid Ismailov (born 1954) is an Uzbek writer, poet, journalist and translator. Born into a deeply religious Uzbek family of mullahs and khodjas, many of whom suffered during the Stalin-era persecutions, he was also shaped by an extensive Soviet education, graduating with distinction from both secondary school and military college and later earning university degrees in several disciplines. Rather than pursuing a conventional Soviet or post-Soviet career, Ismailov became a dissident writer and poet. He left Uzbekistan in 1992 and settled in the United Kingdom, where he worked for many years with the BBC World Service and later became its first Writer in Residence. Although his work has been banned in Uzbekistan, Ismailov has published numerous novels, poetry collections and other works in Uzbek, Russian and several other languages. His fiction has been widely translated, including The Railway, translated into English by Robert Chandler, as well as A Poet and Bin-Laden and Googling for Soul. Ismailov has also translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and other languages. Critics have compared his award-winning writing to Russian classical literature, Sufi parables and Western postmodernism, while his distinctive voice draws on an unusually rich intercultural experience spanning Central Asia, Russia and the West. Kapka Kassabova wrote in The Guardian that his fiction “confirms him as a writer of immense poetic power”. Reviewing The Railway, Shusha Guppy called it in The Independent “a poet’s novel, full of memorable descriptive passages and heart-wrenching asides”, and Craig Murray in the New Statesman “a work of rare beauty – an utterly readable, compelling book”. The Devils’ Dance won the EBRD Literature Prize; the chair of the jury, Rosie Goldsmith, said its storytelling style “captures perfectly the prose and poetry of Central Asia”.