Biography

Novelist Louis de Bernières was born in London in 1954. He joined the army at 18 but left after spending four months at Sandhurst. After graduating from the Victoria University of Manchester, he took a postgraduate certificate in Education at Leicester Polytechnic and obtained his MA at the University of London.

Before writing full-time, he held many varied jobs including landscape gardener, motorcycle messenger and car mechanic. He also taught English in Colombia, an experience which determined the style and setting of his first three novels, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), each of which was heavily influenced by South American literature, particularly 'magic realism'.

In 1993, he was selected as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2' promotion in Granta magazine. His fourth novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, was published in the following year, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best Book). It was also shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Second World War, the novel tells the story of a love affair between the daughter of a local doctor and an Italian soldier. It has become a worldwide bestseller and has now been translated into over 30 languages. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 2001, and the novel has also been adapted for the stage. In 2001, Red Dog was published - a collection of stories inspired by a statue of a dog encountered on a trip to a writers' festival in Australia in 1998.

He wrote the introduction to The Book of Job, one in a series of books reprinted from the Bible and published individually by Canongate Press in 1998 and his play, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World, set in South-West London, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1999, and published in 2001. He is also a regular contributor of short stories to various newspapers and magazines. His novel Birds Without Wings (2004) was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book).

His latest novel is A Partisan's Daughter (2008), shortlisted for the 2008 Costal Novel Award. In 2009, he published a collection of short stories, Notwithstanding.

Characters

• Abdulhamid Hodja — The local imam
• Ayse — Abdulhamid Hodja's wife.
• Charitos — Father of Philothei and Mehmetçik.
• Drosoula — Philothei's best friend. Married to Gerasimos the fisherman.
• Ibrahim the Goatherd — Philothei's long standing admirer and betrothed, who becomes crazy after her death
• Iskander the Potter — Father of Karatavuk and maker of proverbs.
• Karatavuk (Turkish for 'Blackbird') — His real name is Abdul. He is also the youngest son of Iskander the Potter. He fights for the Ottoman Empire in World War I and against the Greeks during the subsequent invasion of Anatolia. After returning home, he loses his right arm when his father (unknowingly) shoots him. As a result, he cannot carry on his father's vocation as potter, and so becomes Karatavuk the Letter-Writer, acting as town scribe.
• Leyla — Rustem Bey's Circassian  mistress, who is in fact Greek.
• Mehmetçik (Turkish for 'Red Robin') — Philothei's younger brother and Karatavuk's best friend. His real name is Nicos.
• Mustafa Kemal — Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
• Philothei — Most beautiful girl of Eskibahçe
• Polyxeni — Mother of Philothei and Mehmetçik. Wife of Charitos. Good friends with Ayse.
• Rustem Bey — the town's wealthy agha (offical in Ottoman Empire)

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) Biography

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, c. 1916  © Atatürk was a Turkish nationalist leader and founder and first president of the republic of Turkey.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881 in Salonika (now Thessaloniki) in what was then the Ottoman Empire. His father was a minor official and later a timber merchant. When Atatürk was 12, he was sent to military school and then to the military academy in Istanbul, graduating in 1905.

In 1911, he served against the Italians in Libya and then in the Balkan Wars (1912 - 1913). He made his military reputation repelling the Allied invasion at the Dardanelles in 1915.

In May 1919, Atatürk began a nationalist revolution in Anatolia, organising resistance to the peace settlement imposed on Turkey by the victorious Allies. This was particularly focused on resisting Greek attempts to seize Smyrna and its hinterland. Victory over the Greeks enabled him to secure revision of the peace settlement in the Treaty of Lausanne.

In 1921, Atatürk established a provisional government in Ankara. The following year the Ottoman Sultanate was formally abolished and, in 1923, Turkey became a secular republic with Atatürk as its president. He established a single party regime that lasted almost without interruption until 1945.

He launched a programme of revolutionary social and political reform to modernise Turkey. These reforms included the emancipation of women, the abolition of all Islamic institutions and the introduction of Western legal codes, dress, calendar and alphabet, replacing the Arabic script with a Latin one. Abroad he pursued a policy of neutrality, establishing friendly relations with Turkey's neighbours.

In 1935, when surnames were introduced in Turkey, he was given the name Atatürk, meaning 'Father of the Turks'. He died on 10 November 1938.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml