Location: Mardinkapı Mezarlığı, Diyarbakir, Diyarbakir Province, Turkey
Cause of death: Cancer
Photo taken by: MikaelF
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Although the Kurdish language was outlawed in Turkey from 1920 to 1990, he wrote in his mother tongue. As a writer, he achieved a great deal towards shaping a modern Kurdish literary language and reviving the Kurdish tradition of storytelling. From 1977 to 2005 he lived in exile in Sweden as a political refugee. In June 2005 he returned to Istanbul and in May 2006 it was announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
Contemporary Kurdish writer and novelist. Critical success came with his novel Siya Evînê / In the Shadow of a Lost Love. The story fictionalizes a 1920's Kurdish intellectual's failed struggle to pursue both his love for a woman and his duty to fight the newly formed Turkish republic.
Although the Kurdish language was outlawed in Turkey from 1920 to 1990, he wrote in his mother tongue. As a writer, he achieved a great deal towards shaping a modern Kurdish literary language and reviving the Kurdish tradition of storytelling. From 1977 to 2005 he lived in exile in Sweden as a political refugee. In June 2005 he returned to Istanbul and in May 2006 it was announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
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