This year has been a busy one for me. On 15 December the launch will take place of my new book. Selected Works of Chokan Valikhanov, Pioneering Ethnographer and Historian of the Great Steppe will be published in a joint venture between the Kazakh Embassy and Cambridge University Press. The launch, which will be a Zoom event, will be hosted by the Royal Geographical Society. More details to follow.

English readers may not be very familiar with Chokan Valikhanov who died in 1865 aged just 29. He was one of the first Kazakhs to be educated through the Russian system. He entered the Siberian Cadet Corps at Omsk in 1847 and on graduating was taken on to the staff of the Governor of Western Siberia. Soon he was taking part in expeditions into the steppes, often travelling undercover in places that were off-limits to Russians or outsiders. Prior to the translation of the 20 essays in this volume, only three of his essays had previously been translated into English.

For this volume I worked with Dr Ziyabek Kabuldinov, director of the Chokan Valikhanov Institute of History and Ethnology in Almaty, who convened a group of his senior staff to select the essays from Valikhanov’s five-volume collected works. The essays were then translated into English by leading translator Dr Arch Tait, before I edited them and prepared them for publication. Their publication is a major event for Central Asian scholarship and should allow the work of this hugely talented pioneer to reach a much wider audience. Valikhanov wrote with great authority and power on the history of the Kazakh hordes, their myths and legends, the politics of the steppes, as well as recording in diary form his various remarkable journeys. I will provide more details of the book’s contents closer to publication day.