Gunel Mövlud: The scent of a tea rose and a bullet faster than flight
– Azerbaijan
Gunel Mövlud (* 1981) is a journalist, poetess, and translator from Azerbaijan. After the outbreak of the war with Armenia, she had to flee her hometown in Nagorno-Karabakh at the age of twelve. She often addresses issues of peace and human rights in Azerbaijan in her literary work and journalism.
She graduated from the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Arts and has been working as an art critic since 2004. In 2012, she began contributing to Azadliq, the Azerbaijani section of Radio Free Europe, as a freelance journalist, and in 2013, she joined the independent Meydan TV, founded by Azerbaijani journalists in exile, as an editor and scriptwriter. She focuses primarily on the topics of democracy, human rights, gender equality, minority rights, peacekeeping operations, and humanitarian values.
Gunel Mövlud has published books Darkness and Us (2004), 5 XL (2011) and Response to the Late Afternoon (2013), and her works have been translated into English and Norwegian. She translates from Russian into Azerbaijani. She lived in exile in Germany and Georgia, before taking up an ICORN residency in Levanger, Norway, in October 2016.