Halit Ziya Uşaklig Il

c. 1866 - 1945

Turkish novelist, journalist, and poet.

Halit Ziya Uşakliǧil was born in Istanbul, the son of a businessman from a prestigious İzmir family. When he was fourteen years old, the family returned to İzmir, where in 1884 he published the city's first daily newspaper, Nevruz. He started up other İzmir newspapers while working in Istanbul as a French teacher and bank employee. In the 1890s, he became active in the Servet-i Fünun (Wealth of Knowledge) literary movement and began writing novels. In 1909, he became a professor of literary history and aesthetics at Istanbul University.

Uşakliǧil is considered a top Turkish novelist who bridged the nineteenth-century Tanzimat (reform) and twentieth-century republican periods, combining the complex storylines and heightened rhetoric of the former period with the cosmopolitan tastes and psychological realism of the later one. In the 1920s, he turned from novels to other forms, particularly short stories, and published about two hundred. He also published poetry, several plays, literary studies, and memoirs.

Bibliography

Mitler, Louis. Ottoman Turkish Writers: A Bibliographical Dictionary of Significant Figures in Pre-Republican Turkish Literature. New York: P. Lang, 1988.

— ELIZABETH THOMPSON