Ilyas Efendiyev

Ilyas Efendiyev was born in Garyagin (now Fuzuli).

He graduated from a two-level secondary school with a pedagogical orientation (1930). For a while, he taught language and literature in the village of Boyuk Bahmanli. He worked as a geography teacher at the Garyagin city secondary school (1935-1938). Later, he was appointed head of the teaching department at the exemplary secondary school in the city of Nukha. After working there for a year, he was sent to the Azerbaijan Pedagogical Institute to receive higher education. Although he entered the literature department of the Azerbaijan Pedagogical Institute in 1934, he was forced to leave the institute and return to the region in the same year, and was expelled from the institute because he was a "kulak" child. He graduated from the correspondence department of the Geography Faculty of the Azerbaijan Pedagogical Institute (1938), returned to the region and continued his teaching career.

He worked in the editorial office of the "Yeni Yol" newspaper. Later, he worked as the head of the prose department at the "Communist" (1939-1940) and "Literature newspaper", the head of the Literary Broadcasts Department at the Azerbaijan Radio Committee (1941-1945), the head of the script department at the Baku Film Studio since 1945, and the head of the fiction department at "Azernashr".

He began to take his first successful steps in the field of artistic creativity in the late 1930s. His first book of short stories and stories entitled "Letters from the Village" was published in 1939. He is the author of the novels “Willow arch”, “Bridge builders”, “Three friends behind the mountains”, “The tale of Valeh with a Yellow Shirt”, “Don’t look back, Old Man”, “The three-wheeled”, many short stories and the plays  “You are always with me”, “I can’t forget”, “Destroyed diaries”, “Strange boy”, “The song remained with the mountains”, “Khurshidbanu Natavan”, “In the Crystal Palace”. 

Honored Artist (1960), People’s Writer (1979), State Prize Laureate (1972) Ilyas Efendiyev died in 1996 and was buried in the Alley of Honor.

Writer Ilyas Efendiyev is the father of writer and screenwriter Elchin.