Mustafa Ziyalan is a writer and poet. He was born in 1959 in Zonguldak, at the Black Sea coast of Turkey, as the only child of Fatma Süzme Afyonlu, a poet and painter, and Nihat Ziyalan, a poet, writer and actor. He is graduated from the German High School of Istanbul and Istanbul Medical School of University of Istanbul. He lived in Vienna, Austria, and Mainz, Germany. He worked as a general practitioner and coroner in a rural Anatolian village and started his residency training in psychiatry at Bakirköy Hospital for Mental and Neurological Diseases in Istanbul. He worked with torture victims, prison inmates, children abusing volatile substances and pathological gamblers. He had psychoanalytical psychotherapy training in Los Angeles and completed his residency training in psychiatry at New York University. He works as a psychiatrist in New York. He has done research on schizophrenia and been working with persons with AIDS and developmental disorders. He has two children. He lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His poetry, short fiction, essays and poetry translations (from Paul Auster, Ingeborg Bachmann, Erich Fried and Anna Akhmatova, among others) have appeared in many literary periodicals, anthologies and in book form since 1983.
Works:
Gülümsemeler Ülkesi / Land of Smiles, bilingual collection of poems; 2009 Manhattan'da Şiir Konuşmaları (Poetry Talks in Manhattan), essays; 2009 İstanbul Noir, an anthology co-edited with Amy Spangler, Akashic Books, New York; 2008 Bucaksız (No Quarter), poems; 2008 Kızıl Kanca Şiirleri (Red Hook Poems), poems; 2007 Yakılacak Kentlerden (From Cities Slated to Burn), with photography by Murat Eyüboğlu, essays and travel writing; 2007 Su Kedileri (Water Cats), short fiction; 2005 New York'un Arabı (Nigger of New York), poems; 1998 Dünle Yarın Arasında (Between a Yesterday and a Tomorrow), poems; 1990.