[1] Arab Shamilov was born on 23 January 1897 in the village of Susuz in the Kars oblast, now located in eastern Turkey but then part of the Russian Empire.

In 1931, he began working on Kurdish literature at the Leningrad Institute of Oriental Studies.

[3] He became a member of the editorial board of the Kurdish newspaper Ria Taza (The New Path), published in Yerevan from 1930 to 1937.

His first and most celebrated work, the story Şivanê kurmanca (The Kurdish Shepherd), based on his own life, was published in 1931.

It treated his early life as a sheperd and how he then became a communist and took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917.