Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar was a poet, novelist, essayist, literary historian, politician and academician who was born in Istanbul on 23 June 1901 and died in the same city on 24 January 1962. While he was teaching in the first years of the Republic, he gained a wide readership with his poem "Time in Bursa" and also published a series of five essays called "Twenty-Five Years' Verses".
Tanpınar, 7th speaker of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. He also served as a member of parliament from Maraş during his term.
Born in Şehzadebaşı, Tanpınar is the youngest of three children of his father, Hüseyin Fikri Efendi, of Georgian origin, and his mother, Nesime Bahriye Hanım. He spent his childhood in cities such as Ergani, Sinop, Siirt, Kirkuk and Antalya, where his father worked, and he lost his mother in Kirkuk in 1915 due to typhus.
The young man started his education at Vefa High School, then continued his education in Kirkuk and Antalya, and returned to Istanbul in 1918 to receive a one-year boarding education at Halkalı Agricultural School. Tanpınar, who entered the Faculty of Letters of Istanbul University in 1919, listened to the lectures of important teachers of the period such as Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Mehmed Fuad Köprülü and Şahabeddin, and graduated in 1923 with his undergraduate thesis on "Hüsrev ü Şirin".
After his graduation, Tanpınar started teaching literature at Erzurum High School in 1923, and in a short time he worked at various high schools in cities such as Konya, Ankara and Kadıköy. During this period, he was introduced to classical Western music at the Music Teacher's School affiliated with Gazi Middle Teachers' School, and became interested in Western plastic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts.
He published the poem "Ölü" in Milli Mecmua in 1926, and then he strengthened his literary identity with a total of seven poems in Hayat magazine. Tanpınar also turned to translation and published E.T.A. in 1929. Hoffmann and Anatole France brought their works to readers in the same magazine.
He started an important debate at the Turkish and Literature Teachers Congress held in Ankara in the 1930s, arguing that Ottoman literature should be removed from the course curriculum and considered as the beginning of the Tanzimat. In the same year, he founded the "Görüş" magazine together with Ahmet Kutsi Tecer, was appointed to Kadıköy High School in 1932, returned to Istanbul, and started teaching "aesthetic mythology" courses at Sanayi-i Nefise (today's Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) in 1933.
He also took part in the program called "19th century", which was established within the faculty of literature in 1939 upon the instructions of the Minister of Education, Hasan Âli Yücel.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar was born on June 23, 1901 in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire. He died on January 24, 1962.
Information taken from TMDB.