Elchin Afandiyev
Elchin Ilyas oglu Afandiyev, also known mononymously as Elçin was an Azerbaijani writer, academic and politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2018.
Early years
Afandiyev was born to the family of famous Azerbaijani writer Ilyas Afandiyev on 13 May 1943 in Baku. Since his early childhood, Elchin Afandiyev was surrounded by literature and an academic environment. Azerbaijani folklore and world literature played a significant role in Afandiyev's future career. He wrote his first novel when he was 16 years old, which was published in Azərbaycan gəncləri magazine in 1959. He completed his secondary education in 1960 and studied at Baku State University, graduating in 1965 with a degree in philology. In 1968, he completed his post-graduate studies at the Nizami Institute of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, writing a 500-page dissertation.In 1965, he published a collection of novels called Min gecədən biri. In the following years, nearly 100 books of Afandiyev were translated and published in English, French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Croatian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Moldovan, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Serbian and other languages. There have been about five million copies sold worldwide.
Afandiyev’s play, Citizens of Hell, premiered in London in 2013.