Ali Sabakhattin

Sabahattin Ali was born on February 25, 1907, in the town of Eğridere (Ardino) in Bulgaria, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He grew up in a poor family of a career officer who moved from one garrison to another across the country, and the boy studied in Istanbul, Çanakkale, and Edremit. Due to the occupation of Greece, the family went through difficult times. In 1926, Sabahattin Ali graduated from a teachers' college in Istanbul. He worked as a teacher for about a year in the town of Yozgat. From 1928 to 1930, he studied at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Berlin, but was then forced to leave Germany because of a scandal caused by an argument with a German fascist student who had spoken insultingly about the Turkish people.

The two years he spent in the German capital greatly expanded his knowledge and introduced him to European literature, including Russian literature. After returning to his homeland, he again taught children in the schools of Aydın, Konya, and Ankara.

Sabahattin Ali's first attempt at writing dates from 1927, when he began to write poetry and prose. All of his stories and novels in one way or another address the acute social problems characteristic of Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s. The heroes of his stories are poor people who struggle to earn a crust of bread and are oppressed by the rich and the police, as well as people who found the courage to stand against the existing regime and fight for freedom and a better lot for their people (the stories "Enemies," "The Wolf and the Lamb," and others). Since 1946, Sabahattin Ali was the editor of the Turkish political-satirical newspaper Marko Paşa, where he worked together with Aziz Nesin.

Sabahattin Ali's works quickly met with rejection from the official Turkish authorities. The writer was persecuted; in 1933 he was arrested for criticizing Atatürk's regime in one of his poems, but was soon released from prison. When he again wanted to take up his teaching position, he was refused until he proved that he had renounced his former ideas.

On May 16, 1936, the writer married, and