High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Yasar Kemal (born Kemal Sadik Gökçeli 1923) is one of Turkey's leading writers. He has long been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, on the strength of Memed, My Hawk. As an outspoken intellectual, he does not hesitate to speak on sensitive issues such as the plight of the ethnic Kurds in Southeastern Turkey. His activism resulted in a twenty-month suspended jail sentence, on charges of advocating separatism. His 1955 novel Teneke was adapted into a theatrical play, which was staged for almost one year in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the country where he lived for about two years in the late 1970s.