He was the son of Abdülkadir Kemali Bey, who was a Member of Parliament and Minister, and Azime Hanım, who was an intellectual secondary school graduate.
[1] Following the birth of his third child (of four) Kemal moved his family to Istanbul in 1951 where he worked again as a labourer and then from 1951 as a clerk at the Tuberculosis Foundation, living with little money and all the time writing.
[2] Orhan Kemal died on 2 June 1970, in a hospital in Sofia, due to intracranial hemorrhage, in 1970, while visiting Bulgaria upon the invitation of the Bulgarian Writers Union.
Orhan Kemal's stories and novels generally depict the lives of ordinary working people trying to hold on to their dignity in conditions of poverty or deprivation.
Early works depicted characters form the immigrant quarters of Adana where Kemal described the social structure, worker-employer relationships and the daily struggles of ordinary people in industrialised Turkey.
His play about life in prison in the 1940s 72.Koğuş (Cell 72) has been made as a feature film twice, most recently in 2011, starring well-known actors Hülya Avşar and Yavuz Bingöl.
He also wrote a story named Hanimin Ciftligi (English, Lady's farm) which was a major success in Turkish history of soap operas.