Coşkun Büktel

Coşkun Büktel — Biography

Coşkun Büktel was a Turkish writer known in the theatre both as a playwright and as a sharp-pen critic. He is best remembered for his three-act play Theope, published twice, and for his theatre criticism, and he also worked in poetry, fiction, translation and screenwriting. He died in İzmir in 2018.

The eldest of five children in a modest civil-servant family, he paid his way through school from the third grade with jobs such as selling simit, working as a printing apprentice, hotel reception and private English lessons, and graduated from Istanbul University's English Philology department in 1981. His poems and poetry translations appeared in Oluşum and Varlık between 1978 and 1985. He concentrated on theatre in the 1990s: Theope (1993), Shakespeare'siz Herifler, the critical book Türk Tiyatrosundan İnsan Manzaraları and the anthology of translated plays Eleştiren Oyunlar (1998), then Yönetmen Tiyatrosuna Karşı (2001). He translated D. H. Lawrence's The Fox into Turkish, and his translation of Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead was staged at the 2010 Istanbul Theatre Festival.

Later he turned to cinema, writing the screenplays İkinci Geliş, Jigolo and Fiyasko. The rights to Fiyasko were bought by Sinan Çetin's Plato Film, and it was published as a novel in 2005 and in English translation by Feyza Howell in 2008. From 2007 he worked uncredited as a script doctor on Arka Sıradakiler.