Jafar Jabbarly

Jafar Jabbarly (1899–1934) was an Azerbaijani playwright, poet, screenwriter, and translator whose works form a cornerstone of twentieth-century Azerbaijani drama. In a writing life of barely fifteen years he produced plays still staged across the South Caucasus and helped found the Azerbaijani national cinema.

Jafar Gafar oghlu Jabbarly was born on 22 March 1899 in the village of Khizi north of Baku, then part of the Russian Empire. His father Gafar, a small trader, died when Jafar was an infant, and his mother Shahbike moved the family to Baku, where she worked as a domestic servant to keep her sons in school.

He attended the Baku Polytechnic Institute and then the Azerbaijan State University's literature department, graduating in 1929. He published his first poems at fifteen and his first play, The Faithful Sabuhi, at sixteen. He worked as a journalist for the newspaper Kommunist and translated Shakespeare, Schiller, and Pushkin into Azerbaijani.

His drama Sevil in 1928 became a manifesto for Azerbaijani women's emancipation and was filmed the same year with his screenplay. The plays Almas, 1905, and In the Year 1905 followed, alongside scripts for the early Azerbaijani sound film studio. He died of a heart attack in Baku on 31 December 1934 at thirty-five. The Azerbaijanfilm studio was named for him in 1961.

His name Jafar derives from the Arabic ja'far meaning "stream" or "small river." Jafar is a masculine name common across the Muslim world and especially venerated in Shia tradition for the imam Ja'far al-Sadiq.