Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu was born in Cairo on 27 March 1889. His father, Abdülkadir Bey, belonged to the Karaosmanzade family, long established among the notables of Manisa; his mother was İkbal Hanım. When he was six the family settled in Manisa, where he began school before continuing at the high school in İzmir. After his father's death they returned to Egypt, and he finished his education at a French school in Alexandria. He came to Istanbul in 1908 and enrolled in law, though he never took a degree. The following year he was among the founders of the Fecr-i Âti literary circle, and his first pieces appeared in its magazines. Tuberculosis kept him in Switzerland for three years. On his return he wrote for the newspaper İkdam and published Kiralık Konak (“The Mansion for Rent”), which traces the empire's collapse through three generations of one household; he also gathered his prose poems in Erenlerin Bağından. In 1921 he toured western Anatolia with the commission investigating wartime atrocities and saw the villages the fighting had ruined; the journey changed the direction of his writing. Under the Republic he sat in parliament for Mardin and then Manisa, and in 1932 helped found the journal Kadro. These years produced Yaban (“The Stranger”), on the gulf between intellectual and peasant, and Ankara, which follows the birth of the new capital. From 1934 he served as ambassador in Tirana, Prague, The Hague, Bern and Tehran. His prose was plain and built on observation; he treated the novel as an instrument of social analysis and gave Turkish fiction a historical spine. In Panorama he drew up the balance sheet of the generations that passed from empire to republic, and in his memoirs he set down his own contradictions as well. He returned to parliament in 1961 and left politics in 1965. He died in Ankara on 13 December 1974 and was buried in the Yahya Efendi Cemetery in Beşiktaş.