People's Writer of Tajikistan. Laureate of the Sadriddin Ayni Literary Prize. Honorary Doctor of Philosophy in Literature. Academician of the national Academy of Fine Arts.
He came to literature through journalism. He trained in Leningrad, at a time when that meant a serious and demanding school, and began in television, where colleagues noticed early that his style of reporting had little in common with that of his contemporaries. He wrote hundreds of essays and articles about people working in science and the arts. Each one, he said, opened a new world to him.
His fiction grew out of that attention. He works in two forms. The first is the rezahikoya, the very short story, two or three pages that hold a single incident: a grandmother slicing carrots, a cat in a courtyard, a teacher's sentence that a boy will carry for forty years. The critic Ravshani Mahsumzod compared them to paintings, in which an ordinary event is given every colour clearly and in its place. The second is the novella, of which he has written four. Jurakhon Baqozoda observed that in these there are no violent collisions of opposing forces, but rather the tangled reflections of a central figure on the events of a life, and that the writer traces the psychological, historical and social ground of a character's formation step by step.
He is also one of Tajikistan's significant literary translators. His Tajik version of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude led the Colombian journalist Martín Rodríguez to call him the ambassador of Colombian literature in Central Asia. He has written book-length portraits of the composer Tolib Shakhidi (Capriccio), the painter Vafo Nazarov (The Lessons of Vafo Nazarov), and the Kazakh actor Asanali Ashimov (Son of the Kazakh Land).
His collected volume Face to Face with the Mirror, gathering more than forty short stories and four novellas written across many years, appeared in a second revised edition from Adabiyoti Bachagona in Dushanbe in 2026.
He has four children: Nigorabonu, Firuz, Sherzod and Mizhgonbonu.