Gunel Mövlud

Gunel Mövlud is a journalist, poet, and translator from Azerbaijan. At the age of 12, Mövlud was forced to flee her hometown in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh following the breakout of war with Armenia in a dispute over the ownership of the region. Since then, Mövlud has worked actively to support peace and human rights in Azerbaijan through her writing and journalism.

Mövlud graduated from the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Arts in 2003 and began her career as a journalist in 2004, working from the cultural publication Kino until 2006. Later, she worked for the youth newspaper Alma and as an art critic.

In 2012, Mövlud started contributing as a freelancer to Azadliq, the Azeri-language section of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and she joined Meydan TV as editor and writer in 2013. Meydan is an independent online publication which was created by Azerbaijani journalists in exile. The service features investigations into human rights and corruption in Azerbaijdan.

The main topics of Mövlud's work are democracy, human rights, gender equality, minority rights, peacekeeping, and humanitarian values. Her works has included investigations into women's rights issues, especially during the conflict with Armenia, the imprisonment of fellow journalists, and the treatment of refugees. Notably, Mövlud has written articles on virginity tests and single motherhood in Azerbaijdan for the BBC Azeri Service, challenging the country's largely Muslim and patriarchal society and bringing her to the attention of the authorities as 'an enemy of the people'.

In addition to her journalism, Mövlud has also published literary works, including Darkness and Us (2004), 5 XL (2011) and Response to the Late Afternoon (2013) and her work has been translated into English and Norwegian. As a translator, Mövlud has translated books from Russian to Azeri, including Viktor Pelevin’s Oman Ra, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Stendhal’s Red and Black.

Before taking up an ICORN residency in Levanger in October 2016, Norway, Mövlud lived in exile in Germany and in Georgia.