Halide Edip Adıvar

Adıvar was educated at the American College for Girls in Constantinople, one of the first Ottoman Muslim women to receive a Western-style education, and worked as a teacher and public speaker for women's rights and Turkish nationalism before the fall of the empire. During the Turkish War of Independence she served in the army, rising to the rank of sergeant and later corporal while working as a nurse and propagandist for Atatürk's forces.

She broke with Atatürk after independence over his shift toward one-party rule, and she and her husband lived abroad in exile, mostly in Britain and France, for over a decade before being permitted to return after his death. The Clown and His Daughter (published first in English in 1935, then Turkish) follows a traveling shadow-puppeteer and his daughter through a vanishing late-Ottoman folk culture, reflecting her own preoccupation with a world already disappearing in her lifetime.

Back in Turkey she taught English literature at Istanbul University and served in parliament, continuing to write novels and memoirs until her death in 1964.