Elmira Akhundova

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Elmira Akhundova (born 26 May 1953) is an Azerbaijani writer, publicist and politician. She became a member of the Association of Azerbaijani Writers in 1983 and was elected to Azerbaijan’s parliament in 2005 as an independent candidate from Masalli District 71, winning 29% of the vote. In 2020 she was appointed Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Ukraine.

She was born in the Ramensk district of Moscow and grew up in Baku. She studied at school in Baku, attended a government program at a choreography college, learned stenography, and graduated from the Azerbaijan University of Languages in 1976.

Akhundova began her career as a stenographer and then worked as an editor for the Committee of Azerbaijani Television and Radio from 1977 to 1980. She published her first translation in 1978 and her first scientific article in 1979. She served as a reviewer and adviser for the Federation of Azerbaijani Writers (1980–1988), then as a scientific worker at the Literature Institute Nizami, and wrote for Literaturnaya qazeta, Freedom radio and Turkish World magazine. She was secretary of the Azerbaijani Writers’ Federation in 1991 and joined the State Forgiveness Commission in 1995. Since 2002 she has been a docent at Baku Slavic University.

Her works include Azerbaijan’s Young Prose (1984), It Is Forgiven by Rescript (2000), A Death of a Polygraphic Worker (2001), Reality Moment, Alovsat Guliyev: He Was Creating a History, This Is Us and Live Time (2003). In 2009, a six-volume official biography, Heydar Aliyev: Personality and Epoch, was published after ten years of research.

Akhundova was part of Azerbaijan’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) from 2006 to 2007. She received the Shohrat Order in 2003 and the H. Zardabi prize. She is married to Ramiz Akhundov and has a son, Habib Akhundov.