Historian · Linguist · Writer
Azer Ziyadlı is a historian, linguist, novelist, and screenwriter. Of Azerbaijani origin, at home in Germany, he writes in Azerbaijani, Russian, German, English, and Persian — five languages in which he thinks and tells the world at once. His first novel, A Handful of Scars, appeared in 2022 with the Russian publisher Kanon-Plus. Its story unfolds in the fourth century BCE, on the eve of the founding of Atropatene — the age in which a Scythian borderland became a kingdom of its own. In German he wrote The Chalice of Wisdom — a mythological epic cycle of the Scythians, built in the shape of ancient epics. Eight years of work, now in the hands of a publisher. In parallel, a third book is taking form: The Age of Wolves. In 2026, Akinak premiered at the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku — a historical adventure film produced with the support of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Culture and the Cinema Agency. Azer Ziyadlı is among its screenwriters. Alongside his fiction, he continues the research from which his books have grown. Essays, notes, and source work can be found in the Club and Press sections.