[1] His father Osman Bey, a coal mine manager, was imprisoned for six years during the Cultural Revolution for being "bourgeois capitalist".
[2][3][4] His mother, Cemile Hanım, taught him Uyghur folk tales and took care of their family, which included Ahmatjan's two siblings.
[4] After going to a famous experimental high school in Ürümqi, he entered Xinjiang University's Faculty of Language and Literature in 1981.
Upon learning of his expulsion, 270 figures from the world of Arab poetry (including renowned Syrian poet Adunis) signed a petition and staged a demonstration against the deportation order.
[11][12] According to critic Andre Naffis-Sahely, Adunis seemed to have a significant effect on Ahmatjan's work: "many of Ahmatjan’s poems marry lyrical descriptions of the natural world with the human need to ask metaphysical questions" and he "seems to have adopted Adunis’s use of the qit’a (or fragment) as one of the primary vessels for his poetics, juxtaposing images to create a vortex of sights, sounds, and ideas that always circle back to raw emotion".
"[4] The gungga movement's works were in free verse, not the aruz or syllabic metrical forms then dominant in Uyghur poetry.
[2] He gained critical attention after his poem Hain Dağlar ("Treacherous Mountains") was published by the popular literary magazine Tangritagh, based in Ürümqi.
[2][4] According to Ahmatjan and Ablikim Baqi, the editor of Tangritagh, gungga "demonstrated an opening out of traditional form and content, an art unfettered by any implicit message of 'social value', and offered a new vision of Uyghur poetry as attuned to the French symbolists Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the surrealists Breton and Aragon, as well as to Manichean scripture and the Sufi poets Shah Meshrep and Ali-Shir Nava'i.
[6] Critics of the movement said gungga poets simply lacked the skill to compose classical Uyghur poetry, with its strict metrical forms.
[2] However, it left a mark on contemporaries like Perhat Tursun and Tahir Hamut Izgil and the next generation of Uyghur poets, who continued to write in free verse.
He has translated the poems of Rumi, Octavio Paz, Paul Celan, Fernando Pessoa, and Adunis into Uyghur.
[14] Ahmatjan's work has also been anthologized in The Heart of Strangers, a collection of exile literature edited by Andre Naffis-Sahely.