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Podcast: The Daily Poem
Episode: Nazim Hikmet's "On Living"
Description: Nâzim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902, in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now ThessalonÃki, Greece), where his father served in the Foreign Service. He was exposed to poetry at an early age through his artist mother and poet grandfather, and had his first poems published when he was seventeen.Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish Independence in 1924, he returned to Turkey but was soon arrested for working on a le...