Hamid Ismailov was born in 1954 in Tokmok in the north of Kyrgyzstan, on the border with Kazakhstan. As a young man, he went to Uzbekistan where he graduated from military school. He was forced to leave the country in 1992 due to his political beliefs. From 1994, he lived in London where he worked as a journalist for the BBC World Service until 2019. In the early 1990s, he began experimenting with musical compositions together with the French composer Michel Karsky. In 2019, he won the EBRD Literature Prize for his The Devils’ Dance. His books have won numerous awards and been translated into many languages, but are still banned in Uzbekistan.