Coşkun Büktel

Coşkun Büktel — Biography

Coşkun Büktel (18 December 1950 – 6 November 2018) was a Turkish playwright, screenwriter, novelist, theatre critic and translator from İzmir. The eldest of five children in a modest civil-servant family, he worked a long string of odd jobs — from selling simit and printing apprenticeships to waiting tables and hotel reception work — while completing his education, graduating from Istanbul University's English Philology department in 1981. His poems and poetry translations appeared in the literary journals Oluşum and Varlık between 1978 and 1985.

He built a reputation in Turkish theatre for a twice-published play and for incisive theatre criticism, and later turned to screenwriting, producing the scripts İkinci Geliş, Jigolo and Fiyasko in succession. The rights to Fiyasko were acquired by director Sinan Çetin's Plato Film, and the screenplay was published as a novel by Çitlembik Yayınları in 2005. From 2007 he also worked, uncredited, as a script doctor on the highly rated television series Arka Sıradakiler.

Büktel died in his native İzmir on 6 November 2018.