Kemal Sadik Gokceli was born into a Turkish-Kurdish family in Hemite, Turkey in 1922. He worked as a cotton picker, tractor driver, and threshing machine operator before he took a job at the library in Adana. Since there were few patrons, he spent his time reading world literature. He discovered Marxism and was imprisoned for several months on charges of spreading Communist ideas.
He moved to Istanbul in 1951 where he worked at the newspaper Cumhuriyet for over ten years and adopted the pen name Yasar Kemal. As a young journalist, he played a key role in stopping the planned destruction of a historic Armenian shrine, the Holy Cross Church on Akhtamar Island in eastern Turkey. In 1962, he joined the leftish Turkish Workers Party, and he served as one of its leaders until quitting after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
His novels include the Wind from the Plain trilogy; Memed, My Hawk; and They Burn the Thistles. He received the Presidential Cultural and Artistic Grand Prize in 2008 and the Armenian Ministry of Culture gave him the Krikor Naregatsi decoration to recognize "his tribute to Armenian cultural heritage and his courage, as well as his commitment to universal values related to justice, freedom and human dignity" in 2013. He died on February 28, 2015 at the age of 92.
(Bowker Author Biography)
