Yaser Turkish writer Kemal died – ElTiempo.com

The Turkish writer Yasar Kemal died Saturday at age 92 after a period of hospitalization, reports the CNNTürk chain.

The writer, born in 1923 in Osmaniye province (southern Turkey) under the name of Kemal Sadik Gökçeli was from the mid-twentieth century the most popular Turkish novelist and his works have been translated into 40 languages.

The author of ‘The Hawk’ was hospitalized on January 14 for respiratory problems and cardiac arrhythmia, and continued since then interned in Istanbul. According told the newspaper Hürriyet ‘the doctor Mehmet Akif Karan, writer, under intensive treatment for a lung infection, died of a failure of multiple organs, including heart and lung.

In 1955 Yasar Kemal achieved national fame with the epic novel ‘Ince Memed’ (‘The Hawk’ in the Spanish translation), which chronicles the struggle of a young peasant dispossessed against the authorities. The figure of avenging bandit could be inspired by close relatives of Kemal, who grew up in a poor family and spent his adolescence in many trades before studying at Ankara.

Mixing folkloric elements and popular legends, with a vision of social criticism closer to the class struggle, works Kemal became extremely popular in Turkey. In addition, you will be credited with having carried literary level the Turkish spoken in the popular classes, thus inaugurating a new phase in Turkish literature, heiress of works with the convoluted style of worship Ottoman language.

Maximum exponent of Turkish literature, the mother tongue of Yasar Kemal was the Kurdish: his parents had emigrated from Van, in the east of the country to settle in the Mediterranean Cilicia, a landscape masterfully portrayed the writer.

Yasar Kemal had received numerous international awards and was regarded in Turkey as the eternal candidate for the Nobel prize.

Besides novelist Kemal was an intellectual committed to ideas of the Turkish left and had received a sentence (suspended) to 20 months in prison in the 90s to “defend separatism”.

The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan telephoned the widow of Kemal, Ayse Semiha Baban, to express his condolences says ‘Hürriyet’.

EFE