He was a prominent cultural and public figure, serving as Chairman of the Committee for Solidarity with the Countries of Asia and Africa, a member of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with the Countries of Asia and Africa, and a member of the Presidium of the Union of Writers of Tajikistan.
Mirsaid Mirshakar was born on May 5, 1912, in the village of Sindev, Shughnan District, Gorno-Badakhshan Region of Tajikistan. He studied at the secondary school in the village of Parshnev and later at a school in the city of Khorugh. For a time, he worked for the newspaper Komsomol of Tajikistan and later served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper of the Vakhsh Construction. From 1946 to 1959, he was the Executive Secretary of the Board of the Union of Writers of Soviet Tajikistan. He passed away in 1993 in Dushanbe.
From the late 1930s, Mirshakar devoted much of his work to children’s poetry. His poem “We Came from the Pamirs (1939) is considered his best work for children. His first major and outstanding work was the famous poem The Golden Village, which he began before World War II and completed in 1942. This work occupies a distinguished place in modern Tajik literature and was translated and published in all the languages of the peoples of the former Soviet Union.
In 1950, Mirsaid Mirshakar received the State Prize of the Soviet Union for his poems The Golden Village and The Restless Panj River.
Among his notable works are:
•The Golden Village (1942)
•The Restless Panj (1949)
•The Twins (1961)
•The Lavand Plain (1961)
•The Love of the Mountain Girl (1962)
•Pages of Love (1975)
•The Rebellion of Reason (1979)
In Tajikistan, a library, a cultural institute, a school, and several streets and alleys have been named in his honor.