Hayati Çitaklar

Hayati Çitaklar — Biography

Hayati Çitaklar is a writer whose career joins the stage, poetry and film. Besides being a playwright, poet, short-story writer and novelist, he has worked as a theatre and screen actor, a director and a literary-magazine editor. He is best remembered for Alyoşa, the one-person play he wrote for Yıldız Kenter, and, in cinema, for his work as art director on the 2015 film Baskın.

From 2000 onward he published poems, stories, essays and book and film reviews in literary journals and newspapers. Between 2008 and 2010 he collected prizes in quick succession: the Special Jury Award of the S. Avni Ölmez Poetry Competition, the Kocaeli University Youth Poetry award, the Yahya Kemal poetry award, the Nail Çakırhan Poetry award, the Arkadaş Z. Özger Poetry award, a short-story award from the Eskişehir Culture and Art Association, and second place in the Gila Kohen story competition. A cinema essay also won an award at the Eskişehir Film Festival. His acting continued in productions such as the series Bez Bebek, Ezber and Mahpeyker; in 2010 he gave up acting and directing to write full time. His plays, among them Bir Matruşka Hikâyesi, Sınırda, Diva and the children's plays Kızıl Rapunzel and Makine Kuklalar, entered the repertoires of many theatres.

His education was equally wide-ranging: he studied acting at the Nâzım Hikmet Foundation and creative writing at the Uğur Mumcu Investigative Journalism Foundation, began philosophy at Bilkent, and graduated with honours from Koç University in 2011 in three fields.