Orhan Kemal’s works still in demand decades later

Orhan Kemal was a modernist pioneer of the Turkish novel whose works continue to be relevant more than half a century on. Producers cannot seem to get enough of his works, with two new adaptations

The frustrations of the working class, the changing face of feudal Turkey, the crippling effects of patriarchy over women and men, the ever-fascinating appeal of untamed chemistry between the sexes. All of these themes are the go-to material for TV producers trying to create the next best TV series in a period where dozens of new shows replace dozens of others.

All of these themes are at the core of Orhan Kemal’s novels and stories. Kemal is one of the greatest of Turkish writers and a modernist pioneer of the Turkish novel. His realist novels on class differences and the poor in Turkey left their mark on a period spanning two decades after the early 1950s, now called the Golden period in Turkish literature.

Meeting another great literary name, the “romantic revolutionary” Nazım Hikmet, in prison in the early 1940s had a profound effect on Kemal’s literary direction and social politics. He began writing poetry and stories, eventually trying his craft in novels and plays.

Kemal was one of the first authors to write about the working class, the alienation of immigrants in big cities, mass urbanization and the changing social structure of Turkey after World War II. He shed a realist light and took a brutal look at poor people living in dignity. Kemal’s stories, novels and plays also lent a voice to working-class women for perhaps the first time in modern Turkish literature.

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