Born in Izmir in 1942, Alev Alatlı completed her high school education in Tokyo, Japan. She received her B.A. in Economics & Statistics from Middle East Technical University, and her M.A. in Economics & Econometrics from Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee) in the United States with a Fulbright scholarship. She later pursued philosophy studies and continued her doctoral work at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, focusing on theology, intellectual history, and the history of civilizations. Returning to Turkey in 1974, she served as a lecturer at Istanbul University Faculty of Economics and as a senior economist at the State Planning Organization in Ankara. She also conducted joint psycholinguistics research with the University of California, Berkeley. Alatlı co-founded the magazine “Bizim English” with Cumhuriyet newspaper and served as vice president of the Turkish Writers’ Cooperative (YAZKO). In 1985 and 1986, Edward Said’s Covering Islam and The Question of Palestine were published in Turkish. For her efforts to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause, she was awarded the “Medal of Freedom” by Yasser Arafat in Tunis in 1986. In 2006, she received the Mikhail Sholokhov 100th Anniversary Literature Prize in Russia, and in 2014 the Presidential Grand Prize for Culture and Arts in literature. She was awarded honorary doctorates by Bülent Ecevit University (2012) and Süleyman Demirel University (2017).
Between 2005–2017, she served as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Cappadocia Vocational College, and from 2017 onwards as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Cappadocia University. Her first original work, Aydın Despotizmi, was followed in 1984 by Yaseminler Tüter mi Hâlâ?. Her novel İşkenceci (1987), which received the Turkish Writers’ Union award for “Novel of the Year,” was followed by the four-volume series Or’da Kimse Var mı?, beginning with Viva la Muerte. In the 1990s and 2000s, she authored numerous influential works, including Nuke Türkiye!, Kadere Karşı Koy A.Ş., Schrödinger’in Kedisi series, and the multi-volume anthologies Texts that Shaped the West and Texts that Shaped Us, pioneering works that illuminated nearly three millennia of intellectual tradition in both Western and Islamic civilizations. Her later works included Ben Böyle Düşünüyorum Demekle Olmuyor! (2018), the two-volume Nasihatname (2019), Suç Ortağı Hollywood – Kaan’ın Kitabı (2021), and the Kelebek Etkisi series. Her final book, A New Perspective on the Education Paradigm: The Mentality Problem in Our Education System and a Proposal, was published in 2024, reflecting her lifelong commitment to educational reform and intellectual inquiry.
The esteemed thinker, founder of Cappadocia University, and Chair of the Board of Trustees, our revered mentor Alev Alatlı, passed away on February 2, 2024. Following the funeral prayer at Eyüp Sultan Mosque, she was laid to rest in the Mihrişah Valide Sultan Cemetery.
