Yaşar Kemal

YASHAR KEMAL (1922–2015) was born into a Kurdish family in a village in southern Anatolia and saw his father brutally murdered at the age of five. He received his basic education in village schools before working as an agricultural laborer, factory-worker, public letter-writer, and journalist. His first novel, Memed, My Hawk won the Varlik Prize for best novel of the year in 1955. Kemal's numerous other books include The Wind from the Plain trilogy, Salman the Solitary, Seagull, and three other books recounting the expoits of Memed, including, They Burn the Thistles. BILL MCKIBBEN is a former staff writer for The New Yorker. His books include Hundred Dollar Holiday, Maybe One, The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild. McKibben is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside, and The New York Times. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.