Cem Akaş was born in Mannheim, Germany, in
1968. He lived there until 1974, then moved to Izmit, Turkey, with his family.
Akaş studied chemical engineering at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and holds
two MA degrees in political science, one from Boğaziçi University and the other
from Columbia University, New York. His PhD dissertation in history was on
"collective political action in the Turkish press, 1950-1980".
Published
in 1990, Akaş’s first book, Noktanın Kesişimleri Antolojisi (The
Anthology of the Intersections of a Point), was a collection of short stories. In
1992, he published two novels radically different from each other, 7 and
Suç ve Ceza (Crime and Punishment), which established his status. Since
then, he has published over 20 books, including novels, essay collections,
monographs, and prose poetry. His latest novel, Sözcüklerin Anlamı (The
Meaning of Words) appeared in late December 2025. His works reflect his
wide-ranging interests and are marked by an experimental approach and great
attention to the unity of structure and content, often compared to Italo
Calvino and Julio Cortázar.
Cem
Akaş is a veteran of the Turkish publishing industry. He served as the
editor-in-chief of Yapı Kredi Yayınları and the executive director of Koç
University Press; he was the founding president of G Yayın Grubu, a publishing
services company. Since 2018, Akaş has been the editor-in-chief of CAN
Yayınları. His shorter works have been published in Canada, Germany, Austria, Argentina,
Greece, Spain, Albania, Australia, Hungary and the United States.
Akaş
lives in Kadıköy, Istanbul, with his wife, Esra Özdoğan, their son Can, their
dog Kujo, and their cat Carbonel.
cem akaş has published twelve novels, five collections of short stories, two volumes of essays, three books for children, and a monogram on robert college, one of the oldest schools in Istanbul. his work is said to be marked by a strong sense of structure and intrigue, humor, and command of dialogue; in fact, he has been dubbed "the play-setter of turkish literature". anthology of the intersections of a point (1990), his first collection of short stories, has been praised as "the M.A. thesis of a slightly drunk sociologist cum physicist cum 'twilight Zone' scriptwriter." In 1992, akaş published two novels to wide critical acclaim: 7 is the pseudo-documentary story of the initiation, rise and fall of an underground prophet, intertwined with the account of an occasionally "eroto-graphic" and eventually violent relationship, and "trompes d'oeil" about the nature of reality and fiction. crime and punishment is akaş's second novel; his version is much shorter than the russian original, and has two beginnings: on one side is a perversely analytical essay on how writers kill their characters in their fiction, which evolves into an exploration of the possibility of readers killing authors through the act of reading itself. on the reverse side is the diary of the author of the essay, who is under the severe delusion that he is hounded by a terrorist organization - this is a personal account of the single-handed battle he wages (in the style of the old don) in a world where to read is to kill.
In 1995 cem akaş published another book of short stories, entitled secret air museum, in which he emulates the styles of cortazar, calvino, barthelme, asimov, burgess and borges. published without its real author's name, this book has been "deciphered" as a typically akaşian work, and a silent yet clever rebuttal of the post-modernist claim that the "author" is dead. early in 2000 the first volume of the trilogy of the age of maturity appeared: where the fish fell captive. the trilogy involves a world, set roughly in the 2100's, where a transnational company called the Project aims to install a new caste system based on the privilege to use technology. a group of rebels try to organize an upheaval against this scheme, only to find out that the real plan is much more complicated. the remaining volumes of the trilogy appeared in 2001: quicklime and the empire of games.
in 2002, akaş published his collected short stories under the title r, a consonant he has trouble pronouncing. This volume was followed by the kant club in 2004, which aimed to introduce the young adult readership to the world of cem akas, and by urbino for the unwilling traveller in 2007, a pseudo-travel book set in urbino, italy.
19 is the title of akaş' novel published in 2009. he published a collection of short stories entitled bicycles without wheels (2012), and three novels entitled night, with squirrel (2016), y (2018), and the shortest form of time (2020).
ofelya (2023), akaş's novel published in 2003, is a take on shakespeare's hamlet from ophelia's point of view; the book's form is based on fractal geometry.
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