Born in İzmir on August 2, 1948, Mehmet Eroğlu spent his childhood in
Osmaniye and Aydın where his father Faik Eroğlu was working as a literature
teacher. He started his primary education in Uşak which was one of the cities
his father was appointed to, continued his education for a short time in
Edremit and completed it at
As a result of the 2-year trial (the Dev-Genç Lawsuit), Mehmet Eroğlu
was sentenced to eight years of penal servitude and two years of exile by
Ankara First Martial Law Court in 1973 on grounds of being a communist.
However, his sentence was revoked as a result of the 1974 amnesty and from that
date on he continued his career as an engineer.
This, actually, was also the period when Mehmet Eroğlu started writing.
His first novel, The Middle of Desolation (Issızlığın
Ortası), which he started in 1974, was completed in 1976. Although it won
the 1979
Milliyet Novel Award, in the dark days that followed the coup d’état on September 12th, the publishing
house decided not to print the book, which was claimed to include leftist and
anti-militarist elements and to be inconvenient. The writer’s second novel The Belated
Dead (Geç Kalmış Ölü), which
was completed in 1981, faced the same end as a result of similar reasons put
forward by the publisher.
Mehmet Eroğlu’s meeting the literary circles became possible ten years
after he started to write - and five years after he received the award – when
the impact of the September 12th coup d’état had diminished. From 1984 on, his novels started to get published one
after the other The Middle of Desolation (Issızlığın Ortası- it was first
published as “Ortasında-In the Middle” but was then changed into “Ortası-The
Middle”) and The Belated Dead (Geç
Kalmış Ölü) in 1984, The Unfinished Walk (Yarım Kalan Yürüyüş) in 1986, The
Man Who Forgot His Name (Adını
Unutan Adam) in 1989. Being a writer who has established a unique,
different and solid place in Turkish literature with these four novels, Mehmet
Eroğlu won the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in
the field of literature, and the Madaralı Novel Award with his first
two novels, following his Milliyet Novel Award.
In 1989, Mehmet Eroğlu was forced to resign from the government
institution he had been working at for fifteen years due to political
restraints. From that year on, he continued to work as an engineer and also to
write. In 1994, he completed his fifth novel, Exile of the Heart (Yürek Sürgünü). In the following five
years, he continued to write; however, because he focused his energy more on
music and writing scenarios, his sixth novel Face: 1981 (Yüz:1981) was published in 2000, after
he put an end to his engineering career in order to concentrate only on writing
and also to do voluntary work in NGO.
Among Mehmet Eroğlu’s cinema works are Pain (Sızı-
1994, 4 Parts), The Middle of Desolation (Issızlığın Ortası-1998, 4 Parts) and The
Circle of Passion (Tutku Çemberi-2000,
13 Parts) which were broadcast on TRT
(Turkish National Broadcasting Co);
and movie scenarios such as The Eightieth Step (80. Adım), which won The
Best Turkish Film and International Scriptwriters and Critics –
Fibresci- awards at İstanbul Film Festival in 1996 and A
Pale, Yellow Rose ( Solgun Bir
Sarı Gül), which won the 1997 Antalya Golden Orange Jury Special
Award and was chosen as The Third Best Film in 1997 Adana
Golden Cocoon Awards.
Mehmet Eroğlu has been giving lectures on the courage of creating,
editing and techniques for writing scenarios in the Writing Seminars
organized by Um:ag (Uğur Mumcu Journalism Foundation) in Ankara since 1999 and
has also been organizing Applied Writing Workshops. The
writer, whose seventh novel The View of Time (Zamanın Manzarası) was published in October 2002, the eighth one,
The
Vomit Club (Kusma Kulübü) in February 2004, and the
last one, The Disenchanted (Düş
Kırgınları) in September 2005, lives in
