Chingiz Törökulovich Aitmatov (b. 12 December 1928, USSR – d. 10 June 2008, Germany) was a Kyrgyz writer, journalist, translator, diplomat, and politician. He is one of the renowned writers of the Turkic world.
He was born on 12 December 1928 in the village of Sheker in the Talas province of northwestern Kyrgyzstan. His father, Törekul Aitmatov, was a distinguished statesman in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, but he was arrested during the Great Purge in 1937 and executed by firing squad in 1938. His mother, Nagima Hamziyevna Abdulvaliyeva, who was Tatar, was a theater actress.
His youth coincided with a troubled period. At that time he had to contend both with the still newly settling political system and with the war. He began working at a very young age, because the effects of World War II on the USSR affected the young as well; since the adults were away at war, great responsibility fell to the youth. At the age of fourteen he took up the post of secretary in his village. Here he worked at tasks such as the census of agricultural machinery and tax collection.
Leaving his village for Kazakhstan, he studied at the Jambyl Veterinary Technical School. He then went to Bishkek, the present-day capital of Kyrgyzstan, and continued his education at the Frunze Agricultural Institute. Afterward he transferred to the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and studied in Moscow between 1956 and 1958.
He began writing during these years at the newspaper Pravda. He rose to fame through his works and was admitted as a member of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1957. In 1963 he received the Lenin Prize. His works were translated into more than one hundred fifty languages. From 1990 to 1994 he represented the Soviet Union and Russia as ambassador, and thereafter, until 2008, Kyrgyzstan.