Cem Akaş

Cem Akaş was born on 10 March 1968 in Mannheim, in what was then West Germany. He spent his early childhood there with his family before they moved to Turkey in 1974 and settled in İzmit, where he went to Seka Primary School.

He graduated from Robert College in Istanbul and then earned a degree in chemical engineering at Boğaziçi University. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1994, he spent a year and a half in New York and completed a master's degree in political theory at Columbia University. In 2004 he received his doctorate from the Atatürk Institute of Boğaziçi University with the thesis "Collective Political Action in the Turkish Press, 1950-1980".

Akaş published his first story, "Gerçeğin Öte Yanında", in the magazine Gergedan in 1987. His first book, Noktanın Kesişimleri Antolojisi (1990), was greeted by critics as the debut of a writer with an unusually rich range of interests. In 1992 he published two novels at once: 7, which soon gained cult status for its surprises and its cinematic structure, and Suç ve Ceza, which critics saw as evidence that a Borgesian turn in fiction had taken root in Turkey.

His Olgunluk Çağı trilogy, made up of Balığın Esir Düştüğü Yer, Sönmemiş Kireç and Oyun İmparatorluğu and collected in 2003, was a dystopia with few parallels in contemporary Turkish literature. Other books included Belkienisbatur (1993), Gizli Hava Müzesi (1995), İse (1999), the story collection Aşkın Zembereği, Kant Kulübü (2004), Gitmeyecekler İçin Urbino (2007) and Guarding the State (2010). His novel 19 (2009) was built on the structure of the suras of the Quran, with the numbers of its chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words and characters all multiples of 19, and was described as the first Turkish novel to treat the Quran as a literary text. The stories of Tekerleksiz Bisikletler (2012) were written in a technique he called subtractive storytelling, testing what remains when parts of a story are removed.

Akaş began his publishing career in 1992 as an editor at Yapı Kredi Yayınları, where he went on to serve as deputy editor-in-chief, editor-in-chief and publishing adviser, ran magazines and book series and helped create the publisher's web presence. He left in 2004 and in 2005 founded g yayın grubu, which offered publishing services. In 2013 he founded Hayat Bilgisi, an adult school in Istanbul modelled on the New School for Social Research, and in 2014 he became director of Koç University Press. From 2018 until his death he was editor-in-chief of Can Yayınları. He also taught creative writing at Sabancı University, worked as a translator, and was among the founders of the fiction collectives Sıcak Nal, ku-ko and tuhaf etki.

Akaş was married to the photographer Esra Özdoğan. Their son, Can Akaş, died suddenly of heart failure on 19 October 2026 at the age of 19 and was buried on 20 October at Hekimbaşı Cemetery in Ümraniye, Istanbul, after a funeral attended by many figures from literature and publishing. Speaking to reporters afterwards, Akaş blamed his son's use of e-cigarettes, said he wished he had taken them more seriously, and said that he and his wife would do all they could in his remaining time to raise awareness of their dangers among young people and parents. He said he had been receiving cancer treatment for five years.

Cem Akaş died on 28 October 2026, aged 58, while undergoing treatment for cancer; Diken reported that he had been treated for bowel cancer for several years. His death came nine days after that of his son. Can Yayınları announced it on social media, saying it was deeply saddened to lose its valued colleague, friend and editor-in-chief, the writer, editor and translator Cem Akaş, and offering condolences to his family and all who loved him. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Akaş is remembered as one of the most formally adventurous Turkish writers of his generation, whose novels from 7 to 19 brought puzzle-like structures, dystopia and Borgesian play into Turkish fiction. As an editor and publishing executive at Yapı Kredi Yayınları, Koç University Press and Can Yayınları, and as a teacher of creative writing, he also shaped what a generation of Turkish readers read and how a generation of writers learned to write.