The Kirghiz Soviet author Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov was born on the 12^th of December 1928 in the ail (village) of Sheker in the Talass valley of north-western Kirghizia. The Kirghiz, for all their pre-Soviet history a nomadic people, had had a very complex and still disputed ethnogenesis. Even in the mid-nineteenth century explorers and ethnographers were confabulating them with other nationalities. Many Kirghiz apparently migrated from South-Western Siberia, where they had inhabited the valleys of the upper Yenisey, Irtysh and Sayan, to the Altai mountains, where they mixed with local tribes, subsequently making their way south under Tatar pressure to the northern shore of lake Issyk Kul. Th

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First published 25 January 2006

Citation: Dadswell, Mel. "Chingiz Aitmatov". The Literary Encyclopedia. 25 January 2006.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11675, accessed 21 November 2009.]