Alla Akhundova

Alla Nurievna Akhundova was an Azerbaijani-Russian poet, screenwriter, playwright and translator whose children's verse and wartime film scripts became part of late Soviet popular culture. Born in Moscow on 27 October 1939 to an Azerbaijani-Russian family, she died on 17 September 2026 at the age of 86. Her death was confirmed to APA by Abuzar Baghirov, head of the Moscow branch of the Union of Azerbaijani Writers.

Evacuated during the Second World War and later brought by her father, Nuri Akhundov, to Baku in 1943, she grew up amid Azerbaijani, Armenian and Russian speech and returned to Moscow after the war. She graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in 1964 and from the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Film Directors in 1967. Her screenplay for Shared Bread (Şərikli çörək / Khleb porovnu, 1969), about children in wartime Baku who learn to share ration cards and friendship across hardship, won her the State Prize of the Azerbaijan SSR in 1970. Director Oktay Mir-Kasimov later said that even if she had written nothing else for cinema, Shared Bread alone would have secured her place in film history.

Akhundova also wrote for films including Car, Violin and Blot the Dog and Along Unknown Paths, and the Azerbaijani feature Like Apple, Like Apple. In 1988 she was named Honored Art Worker of the Azerbaijan SSR, and from 2003 she received an individual presidential pension in Azerbaijan. Parallel to cinema she published children's poetry that Soviet readers placed beside Agnia Barto and Boris Zakhoder; critic Stanislav Lesnevsky grouped her with Akhmatova and Akhmadulina among leading women poets of her era. She translated Azerbaijani writers into Russian, bridging the two cultures she claimed as inheritance.

In a 2019 birthday interview she insisted that unread people make poor company, a line that summed up decades of public advocacy for literacy as much as any prize citation. Tributes after her death in September 2026 returned again and again to Shared Bread and to the idea that a Moscow-born daughter of Baku had spent a lifetime teaching audiences to share stories as carefully as wartime children once shared bread.