Yashar Kemal

Turkish · 1923 to 2015

Born Kemal Sadık Gökçeli on October 6, 1923, in Hemite (today Gökçedam), a Turkmen hamlet in Osmaniye province in southern Turkey, to the only Kurdish family in the village, refugees from the Lake Van region after the Russian occupation of the First World War. He lost his right eye in a childhood knife accident during a sheep slaughter for the Feast of Sacrifice, and around the age of five watched his father stabbed to death while praying in the village mosque, an event that left him with a stammer he did not shake until he was twelve. Self-taught as a bard, he worked as a cotton picker, tractor driver, and village scribe while collecting the ballads and laments of Anatolian singers, publishing them as his first book, Ağıtlar, in 1943. Jailed briefly in 1950 on suspicion of Communist sympathies, he moved to Istanbul the following year and was hired as a reporter for the newspaper Cumhuriyet. In 1952 he married Thilda Serrero, who would translate seventeen of his books into English over the following decades. His first novel, İnce Memed (Memed, My Hawk, 1955), the story of a peasant outlaw hunted across the Çukurova plain, won the Varlık Prize in 1956 and went on to sell more than a million copies in over forty languages, the start of a four-volume cycle he returned to for the rest of his life. An outspoken advocate for Turkey's Kurdish minority, he helped found the leftist magazine Ant in 1967, was repeatedly jailed and censored under successive governments, and in 1995 was prosecuted for an essay on Kurdish rights, receiving a twenty-month suspended sentence in 1996. Honored across Europe, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1997, and nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature as early as 1973, he never received it. He died in Istanbul on February 28, 2015, at ninety-one, of multiple organ failure, and was buried beside Thilda at Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.