Mustafa Ziyalan

Who is Mustafa Ziyalan?

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 have appeared in many literary periodicals, anthologies and in book form since 1983.