His magazine work, which continued Turkey's most turbulent political flow, caused him to spend time in courthouse corridors and prison, like many writers of the same period.
[8] In his very productive literary life, he wrote works in many different fields, from poetry to humorous stories, from novels to children's books.
Ilgaz started writing poetry during his junior school years and evolved into one of the prolific social-realist writers of the 20th-century Turkish literature.
While he has never really been a partisan of political ideologies, the fact that he has written about the sufferings of the people placed him at a left wing perspective.
[1] In 1946 he founded a leading satirical weekly magazine, Marko Paşa, with Aziz Nesin and Sabahattin Ali.
A 2001 short story collection by Turkish writer Rifat Ilgaz published by Milet Books, in dual Turkish and English translation by Damian Croft, as part of its series of Turkish-English Short Story Collections.