Fakir Baykurt

Born June 30, 1929, in the village of Akçaköy, in the vilayet of Burdur. Turkish writer.

Baykurt graduated from a rural schoolteachers’ institute in Gönen in 1949 and from a pedagogical institute in Ankara in 1955. He taught school and became an inspector of primary schools in Ankara in 1960. In 1971 he was arrested for belonging to the leftist democratic movement; he was imprisoned until 1973.

Baykurt began his literary career in the 1940’s as a poet. He gained fame with the novels The Snakes’ Revenge (1959; Russian translation, 1964) and The Life of Iraci (1961), works that dealt with the hard life of the modern Turkish village. In 1962 he published the socially oriented novel The Tenth Village (1961; Russian translation, 1967). Baykurt’s outstanding short stories and novellas are published in the collections Stomachache (1961), The Dwarf Muhammed (1964), and Anatolian Garage (1970). Baykurt has also written studies on Turkish folklore.