The prize-winning poetry of the Azerbaijani president’s daughter and the Dubai Expo both lack inspiration
You might think of poets as poor – starving in their garrets, receiving tiny sums for their occasional slim volumes of verse and all that. Not so Leyla Aliyeva, one of whose works was printed in school books in her home country of Azerbaijan. As revealed in the Pandora Papers, she and her siblings were shareholders of 44 companies registered in the British Virgin Islands between 2006 and 2018, which owned tens of millions of pounds worth of luxury property, much of it in London.
It would be churlish to think that either her literary success or her wealth are anything to do with the fact that her father is Ilham Aliyev, the country’s president, or that her grandfather (the subject of the poem in the school books) was president too. Her mould-breaking achievements are surely attributable to the unique beauty and brilliance of such lines as “I wish the winds would spread the cry of my heart/ To the whole universe”.