Attilâ İlhan (15 June 1925 – 10 October 2005) was a Turkish poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and reviewer.
Aged 16 and enrolled in İzmir Atatürk High School, he got into trouble for sending a poem by Nazım Hikmet, a famous dissident communist Turkish poet, to a girl he was in love with.
Following a favourable court decision in 1941, he received permission to continue his education again and enrolled in Istanbul Işık High School.
During the last year of his high school education, his uncle sent one of his poems to CHP Poetry Competition without telling Attilâ.
However, he left midway through his legal education to pursue his own endeavours and published his first poetry book, Duvar (The Wall).
Attilâ İlhan stated that the nickname "Captain" was given to him by his friends after he grew a beard for a while during his years in Paris.
With the start of television broadcasts in Turkey in the 1970s and their distribution to large audiences, Attilâ İlhan also returned to writing scripts.
Headlines on Eight Columns, Eagles Fly High and Tomorrow is Today were the TV series that were watched with admiration by the public.
While other writers of the period who started their novel adventure mostly dealt with local and travel events and people, Attilâ İlhan worked in a structure that dealt with the city people and the recent economic and social aspects of Turkey.
He not only reflected the big cities of Turkey such as Istanbul and Izmir, the lifestyle of his period, and the appearance of their economic and social heroes, but also examined how Western culture reflected on Turkey, its positive and negative situations, within a structure that overlapped with the characters he drew and the cities in Europe.
During the same years, he also wrote poetry books, Yasak Sevişmek and Bıçağın Ucu of the Aynanın İçindekiler series.
In his series of books entitled Hangi …, he questioned the imitative intellectualism which dominated the cultural and political life of Turkey.
The Attilâ İlhan Science, Art and Culture Foundation, which was established in 2007 after his death, continues its work.