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.
It began with a book without a cover. It was lying on a neighbor's pile for the wastepaper collection — a children's edition of the Edda in Azerbaijani, well-read, its cover long gone. I took it home and read it so often that the pages went soft in my hands. Out of that accident grew a passion that has never let me go: a love for the great epics of humankind. Raised in several languages, I understood early how much is lost when one listens to only a single tradition. Every language I read in brought other heroes with it, other gods, other answers to the same old questions. I began to gather them — not on shelves, but in my head. My own stories I told, at first, to only one listener: my daughter. For years, ever since she was small. When she grew older, she said one day that I should finally write them down, before they were lost. That is how The Chalice of Wisdom came into being.
I grew up among these myths long before I studied them. They came to me in Azerbaijani, in Russian, in Persian, later in German and English — each language bringing other heroes, other gods, other answers to the same old questions. To me they were never foreign literature. They were a tone in which the world spoke. When the West speaks of mythology, it thinks almost automatically of Greece and Rome — of Homer, of Virgil, of Zeus and Odysseus. The epics of the Scythians, the horsemen's songs of the Turkic-Altaic peoples, the verses of the Persian poets, the hymns of Mesopotamia: these are rarely mentioned. Not because they are quieter. Because they were never given the stage. My books try to build that stage. Not as an annex to Western mythology, but as a house of its own. It rests on ancient texts and chronicles, on comparative mythology — not on folklore. And it stands in the cadence of old songs — not to imitate them, but to carry them on.