Mehmed Uzun

Mehmed Uzun was a Kurdish writer and novelist born in Siverek, Şanlıurfa Province, Turkey. Though the Kurdish language was outlawed in Turkey from 1920 to 1990, he started to write in it and achieved much toward shaping a modern Kurdish literary language and reviving the Kurdish tradition of storytelling. In 1977–2005 he lived in exile in Sweden as a political refugee, becoming a prolific writer, author of a dozen Kurdish-language novels and essays, which made him a founding member of Kurdish literature in Kurmanji dialect. In June 2005 he returned to Istanbul. He was a member of the PEN club and the Swedish writers association. On May 29, 2006, he was found to have stomach cancer. After treatment at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, he returned to Diyarbakir, Turkey, where he died, aged 54.