Contributors

The following biographical notes were written at the time of the book’s original publication in 1986. Some details, including positions and affiliations, may no longer be current.

The Writers

Part A

Lesleyanne Hawthorne was born in Melbourne and educated at Monash University. She travelled widely in the United States, Europe and South East Asia. In 1978, she began teaching English to adult migrants. As a freelance writer, she has contributed to papers such as the Age and the National Times on a variety of topics, particularly relating to migrant groups. She is the author of Refugee: The Vietnamese Experience (Oxford University Press, 1982), and is currently researching a new book on the mobility of ethnic families across Australia.

Jeremy Salt was born in Wales. He holds B.A. (Hons.), M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Melbourne, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. Before entering university life, he was a journalist for many years, working for newspapers and news agencies in Melbourne, London and the Middle East.

Harvey Broadbent was born in Manchester, England and educated at Poundswick Grammar School. He has a degree in Turkish studies from the University of Manchester, England. He lived in Turkey and speaks Turkish. He works with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and has prepared various programs relating to Turkish affairs and culture including a three-part series Turks in Australia for ABC radio in 1980 and Johnny Turk After Gallipoli broadcast on ABC radio on ANZAC Day 1981. He is currently preparing a program on Gallipoli for the ABC television.

Part B

Necati Ökse graduated from the Turkish Army College in 1937 and from the Turkish Military Academy in 1947. He served in the Turkish Army until 1964 when he retired. Since 1974, he has been working as a researcher at the Military History and Strategic Studies Department and has been a member of the Turkish Commission of Military History since 1983.

Özer Özankaya was born in 1937 in a South Eastern Anatolian town. He graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences of Ankara University in 1959. He has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He is now a Professor at the Sociology Department of the same faculty. He received the 1976 Science Award of the Turkish Linguistic Society for his Introduction to Sociology. Among his other works are Social Structure and Political Culture in Four Anatolian Villages and Cooperative Movement in Rural Turkey.

Tarık Zafer Tunaya was born in 1915. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Istanbul University. He received his Ph.D. degree from the same university where he later became a Professor. He taught Constitutional Law, Political Science, and Turkish Revolution. He has numerous publications on these subjects. He retired after 44 years of academic life at Istanbul University. He is now working on a six-volume publication titled Political Parties in Turkey whose first two volumes have been published.

Sait Faik Abasıyanık (1906-1954) is considered both the pioneer and the great master of the contemporary Turkish short story, who “projects the image of a realist, but is a romantic in terms of style and the empathy, even love, he feels for the characters he delineates”. A Dot on the Map, Selected Stories, edited by T.S. Halman and published by Indiana University Turkish Studies, U.S.A. (1983), includes several articles and English translations of fifty stories as well as some poems of Sait Faik. The book provides pleasurable reading and gives the reader insights into mid-twentieth century Turkish life and fiction.

Nermin Menemencioğlu was born in Istanbul in 1910 and is the great granddaughter of Namık Kemal, the Turkish poet and patriot. She was educated partly in Turkey, spent a year at Brown University and received an M.A. from Columbia University. Her articles on history and literature have appeared in the Bookman, the Literary Review, New World Writing, Stand and other Turkish, British and American periodicals. Nermin Menemencioğlu has translated a novel, as yet unpublished, and two plays, one for BBC Radio and one for Peter Daubeny’s World Theatre Season. She is also the co-translator of a volume of selected poems of Melih Cevdet Anday.

The Poets

Ercüment Behzat Lav (1903-). Born in Istanbul, he studied music and drama in Berlin from 1921-25. His early experiments were in surrealism. He became progressively more concerned with the social problems of his era. In Three Anatolias (1964) he blends folk idiom, official Ottoman and city slang to bring to life moments of Turkish history.

Ziya Pasha (1829-80). He was a palace chamberlain before he fled with Namık Kemal to Paris in 1867, and then to London, where they published the newspaper Hürriyet (Freedom) from 1868-70. Though a man with a place in Ottoman society, he was determined to bring that society into the nineteenth century.

Namık Kemal (1840-88). The universal man of the Period of Reforms. He wrote poetry, newspaper articles, novels, plays, biography, historical and sociological essays and innumerable letters which provide a unique document on his times. His patriotic verse inspired his own and subsequent generations.

Tevfik Fikret (1867-1915). In 1896 he became editor of the magazine Servet-i Fünun (Treasury of Science) around which the writers of the ‘New Literature’ movement, much influenced by the French Parnassiens, gathered. His is the voice of the Sick Man of Europe, sometimes driven to pessimistic despair by events, yet in the end affirming his belief that “knowledge and reason shall prevail”.

Attila Ilhan (1925-). Resolutely outside the Strange and Second New movements, his is a poetry of exotic imagery, intricate verbal construction and exuberant romanticism. He combines elements of folk and ‘divan’ poetry. His first book of poems was The Wall (1948). He is also a novelist and critic, and in the late fifties wrote film scenarios.

Mehmet Akif Ersoy (1873-1936). He saw religion as the unifying factor in the Ottoman Empire and was against the Turkism of Ziya Gökalp and the humanism of Tevfik Fikret. To him the modern society could be saved only by a return to Islam of the early days. His poems, often in brisk, conversational style, are a vivid expression of his views.

Rıza Tevfik Bölükbaşı (1869-1949). Philosopher and politician, he was influential in the revival of interest in folk and dervish poetry and in the old syllabic metres.

Kemalettin Kamu (1901-48). Born in Bayburt, he studied in Paris, and lived and died in Ankara. His poems of Anatolia in the war years are particularly effective.

Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (1914-). Born in Istanbul, he was an army officer from 1935-50. In his book, The Child and God (1940), he asked questions which he attempted to answer in his subsequent works: perennial questions concerning man and nature (The Stone Age, 1945, Mother Earth, 1950, Hunger, 1951); man and his historical environment (The War of Independence, 1951, The Conquest of Istanbul, 1953, The Epic of Gallipoli, 1965); and man in his relations with other men (The Agony of the West, 1951, Song of Algeria, 1961, Our Vietnam War, 1966).

Melih Cevdet Anday (1915-). “At first he is amazed by all things, particularly by nature; then he attempts to understand and define clearly the amazement he feels, both as a man and as a poet; finally he attempts, by degrees, to change the world as he has come to know it.” (Doğan Hızlan in Papirus, December 1966.)

The Painter

Hasan Hayrettin Çizel (1891-1950) was born in Dimetoka in the province of Edirne, Western Turkey. When he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul in 1914, he was sent to the Dardanelles front for his military service. There, he compiled an album of sketches and watercolours illustrating various aspects of the war. He continued this at the other parts of the front he visited from Edirne to the Caucasus. After completing his military service, he went to Munich, Germany, where he worked in the Hoffman Studios. Then followed many years as an arts teacher in various schools in Istanbul.

The Editor

Rahmi Akçelik was born in Istanbul in 1944. He graduated from the Istanbul Technical University. He lived in England during 1970 to 1974, and migrated to Australia in 1975. He is a Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Road Research Board. He wrote the Cultural Background Paper on Turkey (with his wife Sevim) published by the Department of Education and Youth Affairs in 1983. He edited and contributed to the first Australian-Turkish Friendship Society publication The Change and Persistence of Turkish Culture (1984). He has been the President of the Society since its establishment in 1983.