Author • Turkish literature

Behçet Çelik

He was born in Adana in 1968. He graduated from İstanbul University Faculty of Law in 1990. At the age of nineteen, his first short story was published in Varlık magazine (1987), and his stories, essays, and translations have since appeared in various newspapers and literary magazines such as Notos. He received the 1989 Akademi Kitabevi Short Story Achievement Award. His short story collections include İki Deli Derviş (1992), Yazyalnızı (1996), Herkes Kadar (2002), Düğün Birahanesi (2004), and Gün Ortasında Arzu (2007) which received 2008 Sait Faik Story Award. He also published a compilation book, Adana’ya Kar Yağmış (2006), a novel, Dünyanın Uğultusu (2009), and Diken Ucu (2010), which brought him the 2011 Haldun Taner Story Award. For the “Bridge Books” collection of Günışığı Kitaplığı, Çelik wrote the young adult novel New Kid in Class (Sınıfın Yenisi, 2011). His novel Soluk Bir An (2012) was followed by the anthology Ateşle Atılmış Bir Çiçek (2015) and the short story collection Kaldığımız Yer (2015) which received the Türkan Saylan Art Award. After his children’s novel No-bags Camp (Çantasızlar Kampı, 2016), he gathered his stories in Yolun Gölgesi (2017). Çelik, who has also worked as an editor for magazines, published the novel Belleğin Girdapları (2019), followed by Kurbağalara İnanıyorum (2020), a collection of literary correspondences with Barış Bıçakçı and Ayhan Geçgin. In 2021, he released the short story collection Patikaların İyi Yanı and a collection of essays on significant works and figures in Turkish literature, Dünyaya Baktığımız Yol. After his 2024 novel Turuncunun Kıvamı, he wrote The Estranged (Küskünler, 2025) for his young readers. Behçet Çelik lives in İstanbul with his wife.