Oğuz Atay

On October 12, 2020, Google celebrated his 86th birthday with a Google Doodle.

The secondary literature, mostly in Turkish but also in German and English, is very extensive. See, for example, the report of a conference on his work, Oğuz Atay'a Armağan (2007), with some 150 contributions and a bibliography of over 500 items. This brief account does not attempt to summarise this material.

His most notable novel Tutunamayanlar was published in 1971–72, and his second novel Tehlikeli Oyunlar was published in 1973. He wrote several plays, short-stories, and a biography. He died of a brain tumor on December 13, 1977, before he could complete his final project "Türkiye'nin Ruhu".

Oğuz Atay was born October 12, 1934, in the Turkish town of İnebolu, in the province of Kastamonu. His father, Cemil Atay was a judge and also a Member of Parliament from Republican People's Party. He went to elementary and middle school in Ankara, completed his high school education at Ankara Maarif Koleji, and his undergraduate degree at ITU School of Civil Engineering. He joined Istanbul State Engineering and Architecture School (now, Yildiz Technical University) as a faculty member, and became an associate professor in 1975.

Atay was of a generation deeply committed to the westernising, scientific, secular culture encouraged by the revolution of the 1920s; he had no nostalgia for the corruption of the late Ottoman Empire, though he knew its literature, and was in particular well versed in Divan poetry. Yet the Western culture he saw around him was largely a form of colonialism, tending to crush what he saw was best about Turkish life. He had no patience with the traditionalists, who countered Western culture with improbable stories of early Turkish history. He soon lost patience with the underground socialists of the 1960s. And, although some writers, such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, had written fiction dealing with the modernisation of Turkey, there were none that came near to dealing with life as he saw it lived. In fact, almost the only Turkish writer of the Republican period whose name appears in his work is the poet Nâzim Hikmet.