Saga

One of the most productive poets, essayists and poets of modern Turkish literature, Batur is celebrated in both his homeland and in Europe. He became a prominent figure in the late 1980s, when Turkish poetry started to recover from the 1980 military coup and to engage with international postmodern tendencies. His investigative and multi-layered poetry, some-times close to prose, provides a distinctive attitude in the mostly lyrical, and not always rational, atmosphere of Turkish poetry.The distinguished critic and anthologist Mehmet Fuat has placed Batur among the strongest poets of his generation. Among poets, Melih Cevdet Anday writes that he finds "a certain prophetic quality, a saintliness in Batur's poetry". Gulten Akin points to his "wisdom backed by stories of a lifetime". Cemal Sureya has praised Batur as "unlike anyone else", and Ahmet Oktay writes that his "poetry is like those strange tropical plants that fold up at night, waiting for a possible prey". The editor of Batur's selected poems in English, Saliha Paker, describes his work as "poetical rhetoric that whispers of gallant philosophy and wisdom."Born in Eskişehir in 1952, Enis Batur attended the Middle East Technical University and completed his studies in Paris before settling in Istanbul, establishing himself there as a prominent editor and publisher as well as a poet and essayist. The author of more than thirty volumes of poems, as well as many other works, he continues to live in Istanbul. His work has been widely translated.(Adapted from a biographical note by Efe Duyan at Poetry International.)