Yusuf Ziya Ortaç

Yusuf Ziya Ortaç (23 April 1895 – 11 March 1967) was a Turkish poet, writer, literature teacher, publisher and politician.

He is from the group called Beş Hececiler in Turkish poetry and is one of the important humor writers of Turkish literature. Together with Orhon Seyfi, one of the members of the Beş Hececiler group, he introduced Akbaba, the political humor magazine, which has an important place in Turkish magazine history, and gained a large fan base with his articles in this magazine.

He is a politician who served as a Member of Parliament for Ordu Province. He was born in 1895 in Istanbul, Beylerbeyi district. His father is engineer Süleyman Sâmi Bey, son of Hoca Hasan Efendi, one of the notables of Konya, and his mother is Huriye Hanım, the daughter of İzzet Bey from Izmir.

He studied at Vefa High School in Istanbul. He started poetry in high school with the prosody meter. His first poem was published in Kehkeşan magazine in 1914. When he met with Abdullah Cevdet Bey, he started to send poems to İçtihat magazine. Thanks to his poems published in içtihad, he managed to get himself accepted as a poet. After his family moved to Bebek district, Yusuf Ziya, who was a neighbor to Rıza Tevfik Bey, met Ziya Gökalp through him. He started to write poems with the syllable meter upon the recommendation of Ziya Gökalp. Gecenin Hamamı, his first poem written with syllabic meter, was published in Türk Yurdu magazine.