Nâzım Hikmet

Nâzım Hikmet was born in Salonica. As a young man he studied in Moscow, where he encountered Futurist poetry. He brought free verse, the stepped line and everyday spoken language into Turkish poetry.

He was repeatedly arrested for his political views and spent more than twelve years in prison between 1938 and 1950, during which he wrote his greatest works, Human Landscapes from My Country and The Epic of the National Forces. He left the country in 1951 and was stripped of citizenship that year.

He died in Moscow in 1963 and is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. In 2009 the Turkish government restored his citizenship, and his poems remain among the most-read in Türkiye.