A biography of the late dean of the Bilkent University Faculty of Humanities and Letters, Prof. Talat Halman, has been published by I.B. Tauris & Co. Written by Dr. Jayne L. Warner (former director of research at the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in Greenwich, Connecticut), “Turkish Nomad: The Intellectual Journey of Talat S. Halman” is described as “a unique biographical tapestry that illuminates not only the life of one of Turkey’s leading literary and cultural authorities, but also the emergence of a republic in his native country, and sheds new light on the history of one of the world’s great cities.”
“Turkish Nomad” tells the story of the poet, thinker and diplomat, starting from the time of his boyhood in İstanbul, where he “surveyed the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, walked through the ruins of Byzantium, and grew up in the modern nation created by the charismatic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk”; the book is illustrated throughout with period pictures of the city. The more than four decades that Prof. Halman lived primarily in the United States are not overlooked but are used to discuss how his ideas developed as he taught at leading universities and introduced Americans to Turkish literature and culture through his translations and public lectures.
In the book, notes the publisher, “we follow the literary, scholastic, and journalistic journey of a restless writer, who might best be described by the title of one of his books, ‘The Turkish Muse,’ his 2006 collection of literary reviews tracing the development of Turkish literature during the Turkish Republic.”
The Bilkent Library has already obtained a copy of “Turkish Nomad” for its holdings.