Peyami Safa

Peyami Safa was born on 2 April 1899 in the Gedikpaşa quarter of Istanbul. His name was chosen by the poet Tevfik Fikret, a friend of his father. That father, İsmail Safa, a poet of the Servet-i Fünun circle, died in Sivas, where the government of Abdülhamid II had exiled him; Peyami was barely eighteen months old. His mother, Server Bedia Hanım, raised her two sons in poverty. The bone tuberculosis that appeared in his right arm when he was nine sent him into hospital corridors for much of his childhood, and he could not finish the Vefa lycée he entered in 1910. He went on educating himself and taught himself French. At eighteen he was teaching in a school, and during the war years he took a post in the postal administration. The pieces he published under the heading Stories of the Century in Yirminci Asır, the newspaper he ran with his elder brother İlhami, won him his first readers. He then turned his pen into a living at papers such as Tercüman-ı Hakikat, Cumhuriyet and Tan; the popular novels he signed Server Bedi and the Cingöz Recai series came out of that necessity. The Ninth Surgical Ward (Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu), published in 1930, turned the pain of a sickly childhood into fiction and became the turning point. A year later, in Fatih-Harbiye, he gave the tension between East and West the concrete shape of a young woman caught between two Istanbul districts. His fierce polemics with Nâzım Hikmet, once a fellow contributor, placed him on an intellectual front he would hold to the end; in 1953 he founded the review Türk Düşüncesi. He wrote without a break for forty-three years. He brought psychological analysis, interior monologue and the argument of ideas into the Turkish novel together, and pushed all three further in Mademoiselle Noraliya's Armchair and We Are Alone. He never recovered from the death of his son Merve, who died while doing his military service; he died in Istanbul on 15 June 1961 and was buried at Edirnekapı.