Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet

The work of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet has been widely translated, but this is the first full-length biography in any language, covering his whole career from his birth in 1902 as a member of a cosmopolitan Ottoman family to his death in exile in Moscow in 1963. Romantic Communist portrays a writer who combined political courage with artistic creativity, even under prison conditions. Using both personal testimonies and newly-discovered archival sources, it presents Nazim’s career as a microcosm of modern politics, and he emerges as one of the more remarkable poets of the twentieth century.