Nâzım Hikmet

Who is Nâzım Hikmet?

Nazim Hikmet was one of the most influential Turkish poets of the twentieth century and a pioneer of free verse in Turkish literature. Born in Salonika in the Ottoman Empire, he studied in Moscow in the early 1920s, where he was influenced by Russian futurism and Marxist thought. Returning to Turkey, he introduced modern, rhythmically free poetry that broke from classical Ottoman forms and addressed social justice, human dignity and love in accessible language. His political convictions led to repeated imprisonment; he spent much of the 1930s and 1940s in Turkish prisons, where he wrote major works including the epic Human Landscapes from My Country. Stripped of Turkish citizenship, he lived his final years in exile in the Soviet Union and died in Moscow in 1963. His poetry has been translated into dozens of languages, and his Turkish citizenship was posthumously restored in 2009.

Sources: Nazim Hikmet, Poems of Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1994) · Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry Nazim Hikmet