Please join Hamid Ismailov for a conversation with Ilona Chavasse about his new book, Googling for Soul, a novel in eleven interconnected stories that paints a portrait of Uzbekistan and its people, scattered yet connected by a shared history.

Googling for Soul is populated with people trying to understand who they are in a world that is always in flux. Ismailov writes about lives caught between the village and the metropolis, tradition and modernity, about the language people inherit and the one in which they imagine a new life. 

A sculptor who has spent forty years in a northern capital receives a phone call from a nephew he has never met and must decide whether to save him or send him home. A village schoolteacher retires just as his country changes its name around him. In the title story, a stranger writes a letter to translator Robert Chandler, baring his soul in an misadventurous search for meaning, memory and belonging. Ismailov himself even appears among the characters; real life can be stranger than fiction.

These are stories about people living between cultures, contexts and histories, written by a writer with deep personal experience of these tensions. Ismailov is an Uzbek poet, translator and writer, a student of Eastern and Western literature, living in exile for more than 30 years. These stories are brought to us from Russian and Uzbek by a team of translators: Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Dani Ismailov, Irina Buss-Zolotareva, and Andrew Bromfield.

Hamid Ismailov is a journalist, author and poet who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state called 'unacceptable democratic tendencies'. He came to the United Kingdom, where he took a job with the BBC World Service, as BBC Uzbek correspondent and later as the BBC World Service’s first Writer in Residence. He is currently the RFE/RL Regional Director for Central Asia. 

Several of Hamid Ismailov’s Russian-original novels have been published to great acclaim (The Dead Lake was named Independent Book of the Year and Guardian Readers Book of the Year in 2014). The Devils' Dance, his first novel to be translated from Uzbek by Donald Rayfield and John Farndon, won the EBRD Prize. We Computers: A Ghazal Novel was published by Yale University Press in their Margellos World Republic of Letters series in August 2025.

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse is the translator of, among others, Aleksandr Skorobogatov’s Russian Gothic, Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia (winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024), Village at the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva, and three novels by Yuri Rytkheu, including When the Whales Leave (Milkweed, 2020). A child of the former USSR and a transplanted American teenager, for many years she has made her home in London.

5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA