Elchin Afandiyev was born on 13 May 1943 in Baku, into the family of Ilyas Afandiyev, one of the great figures of 20th-century Azerbaijani literature and a People's Writer of Azerbaijan. From childhood he grew up in a literary environment surrounded by books. On one side national literature and folklore, on the other world literature, became the foundation of Elchin's constant reading. When did he start writing? Elchin himself answers this question as follows: "From as far back as I can remember. I still couldn't read or write, but I made up all sorts of stories and told them..." He completed secondary school in Baku (1960), graduated from the philology faculty of Baku State University (1965), and completed postgraduate study in literary theory at the Nizami Institute of Literature of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences (1969). He defended his candidate's dissertation on "Azerbaijani Prose in Literary Criticism (1945–1965)" (1970) and his doctoral dissertation on "The Problem of History and Modernity in Literature" (1997). From 1969 to 1972 he worked as a junior researcher, and from 1972 to 1975 as a senior researcher, in the "Theory of Literature" department of the Nizami Institute of Language and Literature of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, while also serving as scientific secretary of the Joint Defence Council of the Nasimi Institute of Linguistics and the Nizami Institute of Literature. In 1975 he was elected a member of the editorial board of the newspaper "Literature and Art". From 1975 to 1987 he served as secretary of the board of the Azerbaijan Writers' Union. In 1987 he was elected chairman of the presidium of the "Vatan" Society for Cultural Relations with Compatriots Living Abroad, and in 1988 he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan SSR. From 1993 to 2018 he served as Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Azerbaijan. In 1998, by decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, he was awarded the honorary title of "People's Writer" for his great contribution to the development of Azerbaijani prose. In 1999 he chaired the "Dede Gorgud" symposium, ceremonially marked at the international level under UNESCO auspices in Paris. Since 1998 he has been a professor at Baku State University. He chaired a number of State Commissions and was a member of influential Azerbaijani and international literary and public bodies, as well as of the Commission on Education under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Elchin Afandiyev died on 3 August 2025 at the age of 82.
