Author · 2 works
Sabahattin Ali was born on 25 February 1907 in Eğridere, a small town near Gümülcine on what was then Ottoman soil and is today Ardino in Bulgaria. His father, Selahattin, was an army officer; his mother was called Hüsniye. As the Balkans slipped away, the family moved to Anatolia, and his childhood passed in the shadow of wars, constant relocation and want. He began teacher training in Balıkesir and completed it in Istanbul, graduating in 1926.
After a year of teaching in Yozgat he was sent to Germany on a state scholarship and lived in Potsdam from 1928 to 1930. Back home he taught German in Aydın and Konya. His first poems and stories were already appearing in magazines when, in 1932, a poem led to his arrest; he served time in the prisons of Konya and Sinop and was released under the amnesty of 1933.
He settled in Ankara, worked at the Ministry of Education and the State Conservatory, and married in 1935. The stories of The Mill were followed by the novels Yusuf of Kuyucak (1937), The Devil Within Us (1940) and Madonna in a Fur Coat (1943). In 1946 the satirical paper Markopaşa, which he founded with Aziz Nesin and Rıfat Ilgaz, found a wide readership; closures, trials and another term in prison followed.
He wrote of Anatolian towns, of the defenceless and of the everyday face of power in a plain, hard language, while in Madonna in a Fur Coat he tried out an inward, fragile voice. Denied a passport, he attempted to leave the country in secret and in 1948 was killed near the Bulgarian border by Ali Ertekin, the man guiding him across. His body was found months later; he was forty-one. Years afterwards, Madonna in a Fur Coat became one of the most widely read novels in Turkey.
Sabahattin Ali wrote during the single-party years of the young Turkish Republic, when literature was caught up in the discovery of Anatolia and the peasant, and social realism produced its first works in Turkish. The press was under close control and left-wing thought was prosecuted. The brief multi-party opening after the war gave satirical and opposition papers both room and fresh pressure. In that air, Ali chose to tell his country in the language of the poor rather than that of development.
