Gara Abulfaz oglu Garayev was an Azerbaijani-Soviet composer and pedagogue, Hero of Socialist Labour (1978), People's Artist of the USSR (1959), People's Artist of the Azerbaijan SSR (1958), laureate of the Stalin Prize (1946, 1948), laureate of the Lenin Prize (1967), deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for the 4th–9th convocations (1955–1976), and academician of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. In his work, Gara Garayev drew on the poetry of Nizami Ganjavi, Samad Vurgun and Rasul Rza, as well as engaging with the images of William Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, Omar Khayyam, Mikhail Lermontov and Lope de Vega, and drew inspiration from the works of his 20th-century contemporaries such as Nazim Hikmet, Langston Hughes, Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Peter Abrahams.
