Hikmet continued to be harassed even by the new regime, and eventually had to seek refuge in Poland. In 1949 an international committee, including on its rolls Picasso and Sartre, was formed to campaign for Hikmet’s release, and in 1950, the year he was released by Turkey’s first democratically elected government, he received the World Peace Prize. Indeed, the figure of Hikmet looms in Pamuk’s recent remarks (in an essay in the New Yorker) about his country’s historic persecution of writers, and his joke that it is only with his trial that he has become “a real Turkish writer”.

Hikmet’s case, like Pamuk’s now, received wide international attention. In 1938 Hikmet, who like a great many poets of his time (Pablo Neruda, for example) was a committed Marxist, was sentenced to 28 years in prison on charges of sedition for a long poem about a fifteenth-century rebellion against Ottoman rule. The trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, for having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity” with his remarks about the massacre of Armenians and Kurds by the Ottoman regime early in the twentieth century, makes this an apt time to recall the life and career of another Turkish writer prosecuted - indeed, persecuted - by the state for his controversial views: the most prominent name in modern Turkish poetry, Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963).

Nazim poetry ghazals