Yaşar Kemal

Yaşar Kemal, born Kemal Sadık Gökçeli, was a Turkish writer of Kurdish descent and a human rights activist. His 1955 novel Memed, My Hawk put him forward as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote Iron Earth, Copper Sky, The Wind from the Plain, They Burn the Thistles, and The Legend of the Thousand Bulls, and in Salman the Solitary he turned to social history. He died in 2015.