Yasar Kemal Biography

Yasar Kemal Gökceli was born in 1923 in Hemite, a 60-house hamlet in the province of Adana in southern Turkey. At the age of five Yasar Kemal suffered a profound shock when his father was murdered while praying at the mosque and this left him with an impediment of speech which lasted up to his twelfth year. Surprisingly, it was only when singing that he did not stammer and this led him very early in life to improvising songs according to the Anatolian tradition of folk minstrels. It was this love of poetry that made him want to learn to read and write in order to record the poems he composed. But at that time there was no school in Yasar Kemal's village, as was the case then for 95% of Turkish villages. So at the age of nine the little boy walked to the neighbouring village every day and attended school there. Later his family moved to the small town of Kadirli where he completed his primary schooling. He was the first villager of Hemite ever to finish a primary school.

After leaving school he took up such a great variety of jobs that he himself does not remember them all. He worked as a labourer in the cotton and rice fields, taught in a school for a while, then switched to agriculture again and operated a threshing machine. He went to Istanbul where he was employed by the gas company, then returned to the little town of Kadirli, bought a typewriter and earned his living as a public letter-writer. He even managed to get into prison.

During this time he had read all the books he could lay his hands on and had made friends with intellectuals who contributed to his cultural formation. He wrote his first story in 1947.

In 1950 he came to Istanbul again and after a time of hardship and difficulties looking for work he managed to obtain a job as a reporter for Istanbul's most important daily newspaper, Cumhuriyet (Republic). His articles were written in a unheard-of style for Turkey and have since been published in book form, caused a sensation and he soon won the annual Journalists' Association Prize for the best reportage of the year.

His first book of short stories was published in 1952 under the title Yellow Heat. He then wrote Ince Memed (Memed My Hawk) which was published in 1955. This book was an event both in Turkey and abroad. In Turkey it won the newly set up Varlik Prize 1996 for the best novel of the year and was also chosen as the best-liked novel after a one-year opinion poll among readers all over Turkey. The book has broken the record of novel sales in Turkey. Abroad, The PEN Club International recommended the book to UNESCO which sponsored translation. Ince Memed has been published with success in more than thirty countries, and so have the other novels Yasar Kemal has written since.