Attila İlhan

Attila İlhan — Biography

Attilâ Hamdi İlhan was born on 15 June 1925 in Menemen, İzmir. At sixteen, a first-year student at İzmir Atatürk High School, he was detained in 1941 for sending a Nâzım Hikmet poem to a girl he loved, jailed for two months and barred from schooling anywhere in the country; a 1944 court ruling restored his right to study and he enrolled at Işık High School. A poem his uncle submitted without his knowledge, "Cebbaroğlu Mehemmed", took second prize in the CHP poetry contest, and in 1948 he self-published his first collection, Duvar.

In 1949, during his first stay in Paris to support the movement seeking Nâzım Hikmet's release, friends nicknamed him "Kaptan" ("Captain") after he grew a beard, a name popularized by his five-part poem "Kaptan". Having abandoned law for journalism, he wrote some fifteen screenplays under the alias Ali Kaptanoğlu and columns for Milliyet, Meydan and, from 1996 until his death, Cumhuriyet. In Ankara he wrote the novels Sırtlan Payı and Yaraya Tuz Basmak, the former earning the 1974-75 Yunus Nadi Award. Honoured with the Sertel Democracy Award in 2003, İlhan was the actress Çolpan İlhan's brother and actor Kerem Alışık's uncle; he suffered a first heart attack in 1985 and died of a second in Istanbul on 10 October 2005.