Murat Belge (born 16 March 1943) is a Turkish academic, translator, literary critic, columnist, civil rights activist, and occasional tour guide.
'…This is something that's directly related to the question of what kind of country Turkey is going to be.Belge's remarks led to his facing a ten-year jail sentence for criticizing the judicial ban; he was acquitted.
[9] From his student years in the 1960s, until the early 1980s, he had been an active participant of a close-knit left-wing group of scholars at Istanbul University's Department of English Language and Literature; he used to be a Marxist himself.
On 14 December 2012, Belge stepped down from his post at Taraf together with editor-in-chief Ahmet Altan, assistant editor Yasemin Çongar and columnist Neşe Tüzel,[14] and he has written occasionally for openDemocracy since 2001.
[15] Belge has translated works of James Joyce, Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and John Berger into Turkish.