Ferit Edgü

Turkish · 1936 to 2024

Born İsmail Ferit Edgü on February 24, 1936, in Istanbul, he trained as a painter at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts before six years in Paris, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, ceramics at the Académie du Feu, and art history at the Louvre. He had already been publishing poems and stories in avant-garde Turkish periodicals since 1952, but it was his reserve-officer teaching post that reshaped him: sent in the 1960s to Pirkanis, a remote village in Hakkari, in Turkey's Kurdish southeast, he later said the nine months there left him reborn. Back in Istanbul he founded Ada Publishing House in 1976, running it for fourteen years and bringing out some 140 books by contemporary Turkish and international writers, while also managing the Bedri Rahmi art gallery. In 1977 he published Hakkâri'de Bir Mevsim (A Winter in Hakkari), a spare, dreamlike novel distilled from his time among the villagers, chronicling state neglect and Kurdish poverty with a bareness that made his name. Its 1983 film adaptation, directed by Erden Kıral, won the Silver Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, only to be banned in Turkey for years over the very subject that had won it acclaim abroad, even as the novel itself became a domestic bestseller. Edgü kept writing across every form he touched: the story collections Bir Gemide, which won the 1979 Sait Faik Prize, and Nijinski Öyküleri; the essay collection Eylülün Gölgesinde Bir Yazı, which won the 1988 Sedat Simavi Foundation Literature Award; and biographies of the painters Osman Hamdi and Avni Arbaş. He married twice, to Amelie Edgü and later to Filiz Bil Edgü, and had two children. In 2023, Aron Aji's English translation The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales introduced his work to a new readership and was named a finalist for the EBRD Literature Prize. He died in Istanbul on July 22, 2024, at eighty-eight, and was buried at Aşiyan Cemetery after a funeral at Teşvikiye Mosque.