Yasar Kemal

Yasar Kemal was a Turkish writer of Kurdish descent and a human rights activist, born in 1923 in Osmaniye Province and died in 2015 in Istanbul. He gained international recognition with his 1955 novel Memed, My Hawk, the first in a series following an outlaw hero in rural Anatolia, and he went on to publish many further novels drawing on the landscape and oral storytelling traditions of the Cukurova region where he grew up. An outspoken intellectual who frequently addressed sensitive political issues, including the treatment of Turkey's Kurdish population, Kemal received numerous honors over his career and was repeatedly named as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.