Celadet Ali Bedirxan

The Prince of Kurdish letters, Celadet Ali Bedirxan was born into the famed Bedirxan family of Cizre and became the most influential Kurdish intellectual of his generation. A graduate of Istanbul's prestigious Galatasaray Lyceum and a former Ottoman officer, he devoted his life to the revival of the Kurdish language after the suppression that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Exiled to Syria after the First World War, Celadet joined the nationalist Xoybun (Independence) Society and devoted himself to the cultural and literary awakening of the Kurds. His greatest achievement was founding the journal Hawar in 1932, through which he published a new Latin alphabet for the Kurdish language. This alphabet unified the many dialects and remains the script used by Kurds across Turkey, Syria and the diaspora today.

Beyond the alphabet, Celadet hosted the literary journal Ronahi and published works on Kurdish grammar, folklore and poetry. He is remembered as the architect of modern written Kurdish - the figure who gave his people a voice on the page and secured the survival of their language for generations to come.