The Code of the Word

Olzhas Suleimenov was born in Alma-Ata (currently Almaty), Kazakhstan, in 1936. He graduated Kazakh State University in 1959, and then Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow in 1961. Between 1962 and1971, he actively worked as a journalist, and in 1983, he became the head of the Kazakhstan's Writers Union. He works are written in the Russian language. His most celebrated novel, Az and I, was published in 1975. The novel created a great stir, and was criticized by the literary elite in Russia. Suleimenov was charged with "national chauvinism" and "glorification of feudal nomadic culture." His other works include: Argamaks (1961), Earth, Bow to the Man (1961), Kind Time of Sunrise (1964), Year of the Monkey (1967), The Book of Clay (1969), and Prehistoric Turks - On the Origins of Ancient Turkic Languages and Writing (2002). Suleimenov earned great acclaim on a global scale in 1989, when he organized the international environmental movement "Nevada - Semipalatinsk" which campaigned for the closure of both the nuclear test sites in the Nevada desert, as well as in the Semipalatinsk Province of Kazakhstan. In 1995, Suleimenov was appointed as Kazakhstan's Official Ambassador to the Vatican. From 2002 onwards, he served as Kazakhstan's Ambassador for the UNESCO in Paris. The Code of the Word is one of his latest literary works.