Kazakh Poet Bakhyt Kenzheev Dies at 74

Bakhyt Kenzheev, a famous poet from Kazakhstan, has died at the age of 74 after a long illness. Kenzheev was born in 1950 in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, studied at the Faculty of Chemistry of Moscow State University, and debuted as a poet in 1977. His works were published in the leading publications of the Soviet Union — including Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yunost, Moskovsky Komsomolets. In 1982, Kenzheev emigrated to Canada, and in 2008, to the United States. He is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose books, and was honored with the Anti-Booker, Moscow Transit and Russian Prize, and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kenzheev himself considered himself a true Kazakh. "I was taken from Kazakhstan as a three-year-old, I grew up in Moscow, I am a Russian poet, my mother is Russian, but I am Kazakh. It never occurred to me to take a pseudonym and become, for example, Boris Karasev. People say to me: 'You don't speak Kazakh.' I don't care, and I feel that way," Kenzheev stated in one of his interviews.