[4] His books were burnt by Azerbaijani intelligentsia and compatriots in his hometown,[5] his son and wife were fired from their jobs and a "bounty" of some $13,000 was promised for cutting the writer's ear off.

[7] Aylisli was born in the village of Aylis in 1937 in the Ordubad region of the Nakhchivan, part of Soviet Azerbaijan, near the borders of Armenia and Iran.

Aylisli received his graduate education at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, the elite school of creative writing for Soviet writers.

Aylisli was also the author of a number of dramas and plays, including "Quşu Uçan Budaqlar", "Menim Neğmekar Bibim", "Bağdada Putyovka Var", and "Vezife", which were staged and shown in theaters in Baku, Nakhchivan, Ganja, and Yerevan.

He translated into Azeri the books by Gabriel García Márquez, Heinrich Böll, Ivan Turgenev, Konstantin Paustovsky, Vladimir Korolenko, Anton Chekhov, Vasily Shukshin, Chinghiz Aitmatov, Salman Rushdie.

In one of his recent interviews broadcast on television channel ANS TV he stated that he believes that Karl Marx was a genius, and the world will come to his ideas sooner or later.

[8] In late 2012 and early 2013, Aylisli found himself embroiled in controversy when his novella, Daş yuxular (Stone Dreams), was published in a Russian-language journal called Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of the Peoples).

The novel tells the story of the Azerbaijani actor Saday Sadykhly and his efforts to protect his Armenian neighbors during the Sumgait and Baku Pogroms in the closing years of the Soviet Union.

This element to the novel is likely to be deeply frustrating for many Azerbaijani readers, considering the ambiguous role played by the Armenian Catholicos in the events of the late 1980s.

Let them burn all my books because they have not saved anyone...In Baku, Ganja, and in the writer's native village, rallies were organized where people cried out slogans such as "Death to Akram Aylisli!

[15] On February 7, 2013, the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev signed a presidential decree that stripped Aylisli of his title "People's Writer" and the personal pension that went with it.

And I would not be ashamed of that!Parliamentarians of the National Assembly during the special session required to deprive Aylisli of all state awards, and his Azerbaijani citizenship and insisted that he move to Armenia.

Parliamentarians commented that the novella "insulted not only Azerbaijanis, but the whole Turkish nation," on account of references to the Ottoman Empire's historical persecution of Armenians.

[6][32][33] After coming under strong pressure from foreign embassies and U.S. Department of State on the Azerbaijani government, the Ministry of Interior forced Muasir Musavat to rescind the reward.

"[36] On February 3 a group of young independent intellectuals organized a small demonstration near the monument of Mirza Alakbar Sabir to support Akram Aylisli.

Leyla Yunus, a leading Azerbaijani human right activist, claimed that "Only Aylisli defends the honor and the dignity of our nation after the story of Ramil Safarov".

Human Rights Watch (HRW) voiced its concern for Aylisli's physical safety and called for Azerbaijan's "government to end [the] hostile campaign of intimidation."

"The government of Azerbaijan is making a mockery of its international obligations on freedom of expression," remarked HRW's Europe and Central Asia director Hugh Williamson.

[39] The chairman of Armenia's Union of Writers, Levon Ananyan, offered a formal response to the controversy on February 8, saying, "Kudos to our Azerbaijani colleague!

[40] In February 2014, a formal request was made by various public figures throughout the world to nominate Aylisli for the Nobel Peace Prize - "For courage shown in his efforts to reconcile Azerbaijani and Armenian people".