Mirza Fatali Akhundzade

Mirza Fatali Akhundzade was born in Shaki in 1812 and spent most of his life in Tiflis working as a translator.

The six comedies he wrote in 1850–1855 — Haji Gara, The Vizier of the Khan of Lankaran, Molla Ibrahim Khalil the Alchemist and others — are the first plays in Azerbaijani, and his 1857 novella The Deceived Stars is the first work of Azerbaijani prose fiction.

An enlightener, he proposed reforming the Arabic script to make literacy easier and later a switch to the Latin alphabet. His house-museum is in Shaki, and the National Library in Baku bears his name.