Mehmet Murat Somer

Mehmet Murat Somer — Biography

Born in Ankara in 1959, Mehmet Murat Somer trained as an engineer before moving to Istanbul in 1982; he went on to work as an engineer for Sony and later as a manager at Citibank, and has run corporate seminars on management skills as a business consultant since 1994. After two open-heart operations in 1995 and 1996 forced him into semi-retirement, he took up writing in 2001.

He became known for the Hop-Çiki-Yaya series, centred on an unnamed amateur transvestite detective in Istanbul; though he wrote the first three novels back-to-back, he struggled to find a publisher in the climate of the time, and it was İletişim Yayınları, starting with the second volume, that finally brought the series to readers. His novels have been translated into English as The Prophet Murders (2008), The Kiss Murder (2009), The Gigolo Murder (2009), The Serenity Murders (2012) and The Wig Murders (2014).

Regarded as one of the leading voices of queer literature in Turkey, Somer has said that when the books were first published some friends assumed he was himself a drag queen or transgender, which he has clarified is not the case; he has also worked as a television screenwriter, and IMDb credits him on the 2003 series Hürrem Sultan.