Nazim Hikmet
The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet
Mutlu Konuk Blasing

This important critical biography draws from a myriad of Turkish sources and presents Hikmet as neither the dangerous subversive the military feared nor the legendary figure that he came to be, but as the sum of his opposites. Blasing has given us a moving portrait of a poet for the ages whose life was acted out on the world stage of the twentieth century.

“This evocative biography reveals a towering figure who, up to now, has remained largely unknown beyond his homeland and the Republic of Poetry. Nâzim Hikmet captured the spirit of the new nation with simple but deeply stirring words, and also plunged into the great social and political conflicts of his age. Anyone seeking to understand the twentieth century will be enriched by reading the story of his passionate life. It is a tale full of beauty, and beautifully told.”
—Stephen Kinzer

“Nazim Hikmet is one of the heroes of the twentieth-century poetry. His work arrived to poets in the United States with a great rush of purity, power, and inspiration from a literary culture to which and a poet to whom we were all but oblivious. To have a biography of this singular monumental presence who, like Pablo Neruda, embodied so much history in a life of conviction, commitment, and passion for justice is another gift for which we should be grateful.”
—C.K Williams

Mutlu Konuk Blasing, a native of Istanbul and a professor of English at Brown University, is the author of four books of literary criticism, most recently Lyric Poetry (Princeton). She is also the co-translator (with Randy Blasing) of Persea’s renowned English versions of Nâzim Hikmet’s poetry, among them Poems of Nazim Hikmet and Human Landscapes from My Country, and the translator of Hikmet's last work, the autobiographical novel Life's Good, Brother.

Hardcover / $27.95 (Can $29.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-417-1 / 294 pages / Biography