Melih Cevdet Anday

Born 1915, near Çanakkale. Turkish poet and journalist. One of the authors of the “Proclamation of the 150,” which asserted that Turkey could be saved only by socialism.

Anday published his first poems in the early 1930’s. Together with Orhan Veli and Oktai Rifat, he published the literary manifesto Strange (1941), which demanded the renovation of literature. Their collaboration led to the creation of the Tripod literary group. His collections The Tree

That Has Lost Its Peace (1946), Telegraph (1952), and Side by Side (1956) are composed of poems which meet the main requirements of the manifesto. Anday was the author of anthologies of poems (Constrained Odyssey, 1963), novels, plays, translations from Russian and other European languages, and theoretical articles which were collected in the volumes East-West (1961) and Conversation (1964). In his travel notes Soviet Russia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Hungary (1965) he truthfully described life in socialist countries.