Yılmaz Gruda

Yılmaz Gruda — Biography

He was born Ahmet Yılmaz Arkon; his father, Hasan Bey, had left Albania after a blood feud and settled in Istanbul as a dairyman, while his mother was Emine Mediha Hanım. When his parents divorced he grew up with his father, who had moved to Ankara, and at twelve he wrote a novel called Memo, inspired by Mahmut Makal's Bizim Köy, later reworking it into a poem. He dropped out of Ankara Commerce High School and worked first as a civil servant and then as a bank clerk; poems he published in the journal Mavi in 1952 made him, alongside Attilâ İlhan, a pioneer of the Mavi movement, and it was around this time that he adopted the pen name "Gruda." In 1954 he quit his job and returned to Istanbul, joined the Cep Tiyatrosu in 1956, and over the following 65 years appeared in more than 100 theatre, film and television productions, staging his own plays including Kavuklu Hamdi, co-written with his wife Türkan Gruda. He reached a wide audience playing Celayir Usta in the series Yabancı Damat from 2004 to 2007. He published dozens of poetry collections, novels and translations, and at 90, in 2020, directed and staged Chekhov's Evliliğin Halleri himself. He won the 1999 Behçet Aysan Poetry Award for Çerçi Zeus, the 2003 Yunus Nadi Award for Marathon, and an honorary award at the 2016 Antalya Film Festival. He was married for a time to Ayşen Gruda. Hospitalized with kidney failure in March 2023, he died on 25 July 2023 at 93 and was buried at Karacaahmet Cemetery.