About the Author

Ormon Satarov was the name on the cover of eleven of the forty-one Ottuk Library books, more than any other writer in the series. It was not his real name. For sixty years the only facts anyone had about him were the ones he put in his books, and readers in the villages took those for granted: he had been a cavalry scout, he knew horses better than people, and he had ridden over every pass he wrote about.

All three were true. In 2020, when we went through the contracts file of Talas Kitep, the publishing house that had inherited the series, we found the payment slips for all eleven books made out to one man. He was a veterinary surgeon on a state farm in the Chatkal, born on the upper Talas around 1900. In 1919 he joined a volunteer horse unit as a boy, and he spent the early 1920s as a scout on the Turkestan Front in the Fergana. He was demobilised in 1925, the year in which The Rider from Kenkol is set, and worked with horses for the rest of his life. He began writing in his sixties, after he retired, in the winter months.

He wrote in Iradi because, as he said in a letter to his editor that survives in the file, “the horses do not understand Russian”. The Ottuk books were meant to be cheap, quick reading for the countryside: twenty-seven tyiyn, about a hundred and fifty pages, a painted cover and a chase. He gave the series what it asked for. He also gave it things it had not asked for, which the censor’s pencil found on almost every page of his typescripts: juniper smoke, the malka, priests in yurts, black bulls, and a rider on a white horse at the top of a pass who is never explained. He seems to have known which passages would be cut. Some of his typescripts carry notes in his own hand beside the censor’s, and we have printed the one from chapter Six of this book.

The Rider from Kenkol came out in 1964 as No. 7 in the series, between The Salt Road (1962) and The Last of the Ottuk (1968), the book that closed the series. It sold better than anything else he wrote, and it is the one older readers still mention first. The 1964 edition lost about a tenth of the text. This translation restores it from his typescript, which survived among the Talas Kitep papers, and marks each restored passage in a note.

His family have asked us to keep his own name off the cover, as he did. We have kept the name he chose.

Aidana Mukash kyzy