Ahmet Kaya

Ahmet Kaya — Biography

Ahmet Kaya (28 October 1957, Malatya – 16 November 2000, Paris) was a Turkish singer, lyricist, composer and musician, regarded as one of the leading figures of the style known in Turkey as özgün and protest music. His records rank among the country's biggest-selling albums.

His family had relocated from Adıyaman to Malatya in 1956, and he was born there as the fifth child of a Kurdish father from Adıyaman and a Turkish mother from Erzurum. Raised amid financial hardship, he completed primary school in Malatya. In a documentary devoted to his life he recounted that his first contact with music came at the age of six, when his father presented him with a bağlama.

His professional career took off in the mid-1980s. The debut album Ağlama Bebeğim appeared in 1985 and was followed within the same year by Acılara Tutunmak; then came Şafak Türküsü and An Gelir (1986), Yorgun Demokrat (1987), Başkaldırıyorum (1988) and İyimser Bir Gül (1989). Throughout the 1990s he reached an enormous listenership through Sevgi Duvarı (1990), Başım Belada (1991), Dokunma Yanarsın (1992), Tedirgin (1993), Şarkılarım Dağlara (1994), Beni Bul (1995), Yıldızlar ve Yakamoz (1996) and Dosta Düşmana Karşı (1998), while the concert recordings Resitaller 1 and Resitaller 2 also came out during those years.

His artistic life extended beyond the stage into film and television. He appeared as an actor in the feature films Nisan Bitti (1986) and Bay E (1995) and took a role in the television series Aynalar (1996); he also wrote the scores for Tatar Ramazan (1990) and its sequel Tatar Ramazan: Sürgünde (1992).

In February 1999, at an awards night bringing together the country's most popular performers, he collected the Musician of the Year prize and declared his wish to perform a song in Kurdish. The remark triggered an uproar; press coverage described the evening ending in turmoil, and the artist soon faced intense public hostility together with legal action. In the wake of these developments he left Turkey, made his home in Paris and lived out his remaining years in exile. On 16 November 2000 he suffered a fatal heart attack in the 15th arrondissement of Paris; he was 43.

Describing himself as a socialist democrat and an advocate of human rights, he remained a politically contested figure for his whole career, and accounts note that in his later period he staged texts aimed at bringing the Turkish and Kurdish peoples closer together. Following his death, releases such as Hoşçakalın Gözüm... (2001), Biraz da Sen Ağla (2003) and Ülkemde Son Turnem (2010) appeared, and his songs have kept finding new audiences across generations. He was honoured with the Presidential Grand Award for Culture and Arts.