Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) was a Turkish novelist, poet, essayist and one of the most important modern writers of the Turkish language. His novel The Time Regulation Institute is a comedic masterpiece about bureaucracy, modernity and the Turkish adoption of Western time, and is now celebrated as a world classic.

Tanpınar taught aesthetics, art history and literature, and his erudition runs through his densely textured prose. Together with his other fiction and his great critical essays on Turkish poetry, he remains a towering, endlessly reread figure of modern Turkish letters.