Yaşar Kemal

Kemal grew up in a Kurdish family in the cotton-growing plains of southern Anatolia, lost an eye in a childhood accident, and left school early to work as a laborer, scribe, and tractor driver among the region's sharecroppers and villagers whose oral storytelling traditions he absorbed firsthand. He was jailed repeatedly under Turkish law for his leftist journalism and his advocacy for Kurdish rights, both before and after his fiction made him famous.

Memed, My Hawk (1955), his first novel, follows a young villager driven to banditry by a cruel landlord, cast in the register of Anatolian folk epic rather than conventional realism; he continued Memed's story across several sequels over the following decades. His fiction gave a literary voice to a rural Turkey largely absent from the country's urban, Istanbul-centered literary establishment.

He was repeatedly named as a Nobel Prize contender without winning, and died in Istanbul in 2015 as one of modern Turkish literature's most translated writers.