Nâzım Hikmet

Nâzım Hikmet spent thirteen years in Turkish prisons and wrote the poems there that made him the national poet. He was born in Salonica into an Ottoman official family, went to Moscow as a student in the early 1920s, and came back with a communism he never abandoned and a verse technique learned from the Russian futurists. He broke Turkish poetry open by discarding the quantitative metres of the Ottoman tradition for free verse in the spoken language, which is the reason he matters technically as well as politically. He was arrested repeatedly through the 1930s, and in 1938 was sentenced to twenty-eight years on the charge that military cadets had been reading his poems. The sentence produced the work. He wrote Human Landscapes from My Country in prison - an epic of ordinary Turkish lives - and the letters to his wife Piraye, and the Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin about a fifteenth-century rising for common property. An international campaign with Sartre, Picasso, Neruda and Robeson, and an eighteen-day hunger strike, got him an amnesty in 1950. He fled by rowing boat into the Black Sea a year later after being called up for military service at forty-nine, and was stripped of his citizenship. He died in Moscow in 1963 and is buried there. Turkey restored his citizenship in 2009, forty-six years afterwards, and his poem about the girl who died at Hiroshima and knocks at every door asking for nothing has been set to music and sung in a dozen languages. He asked to be buried under a plane tree in an Anatolian village, and has not been.

• Lived: 1902 CE – 1963 CE
• Nationality: Turkish
• Roles: poet