Kemel Ishakov was born on 9 October 1930 in this house, to a Christian family of horse herders on the Arsha-Say collective farm. His grandmother had come back alive from the flight of 1916, and her stories became The Last Pass. His father Ishak, a herder, was away eight years from 1945 and came home in 1953.
He studied Iradi and Russian philology at the Talas Pedagogical Institute, finished in 1952, and came home to teach in the village school, where the museum’s guides still take school parties. His first story was printed in 1956.
In 1960 he went to Talas as an editor at the state publishing house. From then until his death the family house was where he wrote: every summer from June to the first snow, at the desk under the window.
The Last Pass (1964) made his name across the Soviet Union and won the State Prize of the Iradi SSR in 1966. He chaired the Union of Writers of the Iradi SSR from 1986 to 1991, and in 1996 he was the first to receive the Altyn-Zhylky lifetime award.
He died in Talas on 2 February 2009 and was buried on the hill above Arsha-Say. The house opened as a museum in 2012.
Grey Mane, a story
The Last Pass, a novella
The Silent Bell, a novel
The Black Bull, a novel
White Cloud, a novella
Since 2010 the Altyn-Zhylky Awards have given the Kemel Ishakov Prize for a first book in Iradi. Every August the year’s winner reads in the garden of the house.
“Write it as your grandmother would say it.”
Pencilled on the wall above his desk.