KABAR, June 11, 2008:Prominent writer Chingiz Aitmatov died on Tuesday evening in a clinic in Nuremberg, Germany. He was hospitalized on May 16 in Kazan with lung and kidney failure after catching pneumonia. On May 19 he was transferred to Germany by plane.
Chingiz Aitmatov succumbed to the consequences of a serious inflammation of the lungs, Dossaly Essenaliyev, the spokesman for the Kyrgyz President told.
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev has given orders for the organisation of his funeral in Bishkek.
The spokesman added that Chingiz Aitmatov had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature this year.
A former Kyrgyzstan ambassador to Brussels and a trained veterinarian, Chingiz Aitmatov was awarded the Lenin Prize - one of the highest awards of the Soviet era - in 1963.
Chingiz Aitmatov, who studied at Moscow's Gorky Literary Institute between 1956 and 1958, found critical success with 'Jamilya' that year, 1980's 'The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years' reaching an international audience.
Born in December 1928 at Sheker, in Kyrgyzstan’s Talas oblast, Chingiz Aitmatov was elected to the Supreme Soviet legislative body, and was Soviet ambassador to Luxembourg when the union broke up.
A supporter of perestroika, former leader Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Aitmatov to his presidential council in 1990, the same year he was despatched back to Kyrgyzstan during ethnic fighting with Uzbeks from what became Uzbekistan.
Информационное агентство "Кабар", 2008 год
_________________________________________________
Seniors World Chronicle adds:
MSN Encarta has this note about Chingiz Aitmatov:
Chingiz Aimatov (1928–2008), novelist from the area of central Asia that is now Kyrgyzstan, whose work dramatizes the conflict between traditional customs and the Western values of the Soviet Union. Aimatov’s work draws on the oral epic tradition (the Kyrgyz language had no alphabet until 1928) of Kyrgyz nomads. His books, including The White Steamship(1970) and The Day Lasts Longer than a Century(1980), were written when Kyrgyzstan was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which imposed industrialization and many other political and cultural changes on Kyrgyzstan.
