Sabahattin Ali (25 February 1907 – 2 April 1948) was a Turkish novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist.

He was born in 1907 in Eğridere township (now Ardino in southern Bulgaria) of the Sanjak of Gümülcine (now Komotini in northern Greece), in the Ottoman Empire.

After serving as a teacher in Yozgat for one year, he earned a fellowship from the Ministry of National Education and studied in Potsdam, Germany from 1928 to 1930.

While he was serving as a teacher in Konya, he was arrested for a poem he wrote criticizing Atatürk's policies, and accused of libelling two other journalists.

[1] Having served his sentence for several months in Konya and then in the Sinop Fortress Prison, he was released in 1933 in an amnesty granted to mark the 10th anniversary of the declaration of the Republic of Turkey.

After proving his allegiance to Atatürk by writing the poem "Benim Aşkım" (literally: My Love or My Passion), he was assigned to the publications division at the Ministry of National Education.

Ali founded and edited a popular weekly magazine called Marko Paşa (pronounced "Marco Pasha"), together with Aziz Nesin and Rıfat Ilgaz.

[2] In the period between 1941 and 1944 he was among the directors of a monthly sociology journal entitled Yurt ve Dünya based in Ankara.

[4] Sabahattin Ali's stories were about the daily struggles of ordinary and poor people in cities and rural Anatolia, where he had been appointed as clerk and worked for years.

Sabahattin Ali's stories are texts built on the conflict that forms the basis of dialectical materialism.

[5]His stories about the people who live in rural Anatolia focus on the social injustice, corruption, and mismanagement by bureaucracy in those areas.

Some stories such as Kağnı, focus on the relationships and hierarchy between men and women, landlord and tenant, rich and poor, government officials and villagers.

Kağnı is a story in which Sabahattin Ali depicts the rotten order that has become entrenched in the villages in an impressive way.

Because of a field issue, Savrukların Hüseyin shot Sarı Mehmet in Arkbaşı (Ali, 2002:163).

Power relations are at the forefront in the attempts to persuade the old woman not to file a complaint with imperious attitudes.

[6]Sabahattin Ali, being a supporter of social realism, had published books, poems and articles that were censored and banned by the Government of Turkey at that time.

In 1932, he was accused of insulting Mustafa Kemal, and was sent to Sinop Fortress Prison, where he spent almost year until he was released with the Blanket clemency of 1933, thanks to the 10th anniversary of the Republic of Turkey.

One of the poems, "Prison Song V" (also known as "Aldırma Gönül") was set to music by Turkish musician Kerem Güney years later and achieved popularity.

It is generally believed that he was killed by Ali Ertekin, a smuggler with connections to the National Security Service, who had been paid to help him pass the border.

At first glance I recognized them as Sabahattin's trousers... Woolen fabric, taupe colored, brown checkered...

Ertekin said that he had agreed with Sabahattin Ali to smuggle him across the Bulgarian border in exchange for money, but that he committed the murder because “his national feelings were aroused when he expressed his communist ideas and his desire to divide the country”.

Sabahattin Ali's 100th birth anniversary was celebrated in the city of Ardino, Bulgaria on 31 March 2007.

Its translations have recently hit the best sellers lists and have sold a record number of copies in his country of birth.

With this novel, Sabahattin Ali became one of the two Turkish novelists (together with Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's "The Time Regulation Institute")[15] whose works were published as Penguin Classics,[16] where the novel was published in a translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe and with a scholarly introduction by David Selim Sayers.