by Ömer Seyfettin

Ömer Seyfettin was born in Gönen (now in Turkey) in 1884. He was educated at the Ottoman Military Academy and served two separate terms of duty in the military. The first was in 1909, when he was part of the army that suppressed the Irtica, a rebellion by religious groups against the newly reinstated constitutional order. The second was at the start of the Balkan War, during which he spent approximately one year (1912-13) as a prisoner of war in Greece. In 1914 Seyfettin accepted a position teaching literature at a high school in Istanbul; he died of diabetes only a few years later in 1920 at the early age of 36. By this time, he had written a number of works, including a novel and more than a...