About Yaşar Kemal Yaşar Kemal (born Kemal Sadık 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.