Ayşe Kulin once bitterly complained that the fact that her books made the best-sellers list was a mixed blessing because it prevented the literary critics from taking her seriously.
“My books just sell too much and there is a literary clique which regards best-selling authors as unworthy”, she complained in an interview with the daily newspaper Radikal some time ago.
But later, with several biographies to her credit, she managed to laugh this off: “I guess there are worse things than that. What if I had been a writer with no readers?” A recent survey puts Mrs Kulin as the second most-widely read writer in Turkey, right after Elif Şafak, the author of “The Bastard of Istanbul.” Some 292,000 copies of Mrs Kulin’s books had been sold in the year 2009, twice as much as those of Nobel-winner Orhan Pamuk.
Despite her complaints of being far away from the “literary establishment,” it would still be very difficult to consider the 69-years-old writer as one who came out of the cold to the intellectual circles of Istanbul, Turkey’s cultural and economic capital. The grand-daughter of an Ottoman vizier, the graduate of the Arnavutköy Girls College in Istanbul, Mrs Kulin worked as an editor, scenarist and arts director in various publications. She was linked, both through school chums and colleagues, to the artistic and literary circles.
One of the stories in her first book of short stories, “Güneşe Dön Yüzünü” (Turn Your Face to the Sun) was made into a film called “Kırk Bebek” (One Broken Doll) and won a screenplay award from the Ministry of Culture. She turned to writing biographies in 1996. She started with the biography of composer Münir Nureddin Selçuk titled “Bir Tatlı Huzur” (A Delicious Moment of Contentment) – a line from his best known song. In 1997, she was chosen “The Writer of the Year" by the Istanbul Communication Faculty for her biographical novel “Adı Aylin” – the real-life story of a Turkish woman whose stormy personal life was coupled with a successful professional one.
She found her inspiration in family history and in her close or outer circles. In November 1999, she wrote a novel called “Sevdalinka” about the Bosnian Civil War which also made use of her family history. A year later, she wrote the biographical novel called “Füreya” – named after Turkey’s first female ceramics artist and the turbulent years of the early republic.
Mrs Kulin fervently investigated and wrote about the republic’s history and the contemporary political issues: In June 2001, she put out a novel titled “Köprü “ (Bridge) about the drama in Turkey's eastern provinces and how they shaped the republic's early history. In her novel called “Bir Gün,” (translated to English with the title Face-to-Face) she explored the Kurdish question, through a long interview between a journalist and a Kurdish activist in prison.
She also addressed the issue of the non-Moslem community’s life in Turkey in a book called “Nefes Nefese” (Last Train to Istanbul) where she described the real story of the Turkish diplomats who saved the lives of Jews during the holocaust in World War II.
Mrs Kulin´s most recent biography, “Türkan” tells the story of Turkey’s tireless activist, Türkan Saylan, the founder of the Association for Support of Contemporary Living, who died in 2009. Kulin attributed the success of her biographies not to herself but to the readers. “The public is interested in reading about real lives,” she explained.
