Hasan Ali ToptaÅŸ

Hasan Ali Toptas (* October 15, 1958 in Çal, Denizli ) is a Turkish writer.

Life

Hasan was born in 1958 and grew up in Çal buldan the son of a motorist on. Toptas graduated from the Turkish equivalent of the high school and higher vocational school for financial officers. In 1981 Toptas worked as a bailiff in several small towns and is now an official in the Ministry of Finance in Sincan near Ankara.

Loneliness as through vocational dislocations course Coated stranger and the local society brought the introvert anyway for writing.

" I thought I was the brunt of the loneliness that I have experienced in these small towns, completely driven into the world of letters. This life that is lived in small provincial towns, the mayor, the wine festivals, minibuses, all its missing, the silent women, the children who sneak into the cinema halls, the people who are crushed by the weight of life, their concerns, their hopelessness, their stories that are told in the light of the kerosene lamp - they all found their way into my stories and novels. "

After numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies can accommodate 1987 came his first own collection of short stories. Personality of smiles had been so often rejected that Toptas let the book finally print at their own expense. Only in 1994 was followed almost instantly the wide public recognition with his novel The Shadowless. Since then he has published three of his own anthologies of short stories and four novels. In May 2006 he received the most prestigious literary award in Turkey was awarded the Orhan Kemal price. The literary scholar Yıldız Ecevit said of him, " Hasan Ali Toptas is one of the few milestones in Turkish literature of the last 25 years." The Zurich Unionsverlag submitted, as part of its Turkish Library in August 2006, the novel The Shadowless the first time in German translation. In November 2006 Toptas went along with his translator on an extensive reading tour through Germany.

Works (selection)

• The Shadowless ( translation of Gerhard Meier ) Union Verlag, Zurich, 2006. 265 pp. ISBN 3-293-10004- X
• I Haz Türkiye İş Bankası Hüzünlü Kültür Yayınları, Aralık 2002. ISBN 975-458-398-6