People like Ahmet Ümit

Ahmet Ümit (born 1960) is a Turkish author and poet. He is best known for his crime novels.

Ahmet Ümit was born in Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey in 1960. His father was a kilim merchant and his mother a tailor. He was the youngest of the seven siblings. He finished his primary and middle school in his hometown. Ümit attended the Atatürk High School, however, finished it in Ergani, Diyarbakır. In 1979, he went to Istanbul to study Public Administration at Marmara University. He met his future wife Vildan during the university years, and married in 1981. They have a daughter Gül.

Ümit became a member of a leftist organization, which struggled against the military regime in Turkey. He took active part in the "No to the New Constitution" campaign against the constitutional referendum of 1982 following the 1980 coup d'état. He wrote a report about the police operation, at which his comrades were arrested after attaching protest posters on building walls. The report, in reality a short story, was published in Problems of Peace and Socialism, a journal of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Praqgue, then Czechoslovakia. His first story was so published in 40 languages. In 1983, he graduated from the university.