Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil/Uşakizâde haːˈlit ziˈjaː uʃaklɯˈgil) (1867 - 27 March 1945) was a Turkish

Turkish people

Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...

 author

Turkish literature

Turkish literature comprises both oral compositions and written texts in the Turkish language, either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusively literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of Turkey today...

.

Biography

Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil was born in Istanbul in 1865. He went to primary school and then attended the secondary school Fatih Rustiyesi in the same city. His family moved to Izmir in 1879. He completed his secondary education in Izmir attending the school which now is known as Izmir Atatürk Lisesi

Izmir Ataturk Lisesi

İzmir Atatürk Lisesi is a prominent K-12 educational institution in İzmir, Turkey.-History:İzmir Atatürk Lisesi was established in 1888 as a 5-year preparatory school. The school was subsequently converted to a 7-year preparatory school in 1890 and became a high school in 1910...

. He later attended a Christian school to learn French where he completed his first translation works.

Uşaklıgil founded the newspaper Hizmet in 1886. After 1896 his works were published in the Turkish literary journal Servet-i fünûn

Servet-i Fünun

Servet-i Fünun , was an avant-garde journal that Halit Ziya and the other writers of the “new literature” published to inform their readers about European, particularly French, cultural and intellectual movements.-Source:...

, known for its adoption of European literary styles.

When his novel Kırık Hayatlar (Broken Lives) was censored by the Ottoman Regime in 1901 he stopped publishing novels. Broken Lives could only be published in 1923 after the creation of modern Turkey.

Uşaklıgil's early style is based closely on French Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

 and most of his novels deal with unfulfilled love. His work is distinguished from contemporary Turkish literature by its more concrete form and creates its own artistic language through the use of Persian and Arabic loanwords.

In his later years the writer moved to the village of San Stefano near Istanbul. In 1926, when a new law imposed to give a Turkish name to each community, he suggested to give to the village its present name of Yeşilköy

Yesilköy

Yeşilköy is a neighborhood of the Bakırköy municipality of Istanbul, Turkey.It is located along the Marmara Sea about 11 kilometers west of Istanbul's historic city center...

 ("Green Village" in Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

).

External links

• Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism - Biography of Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil