ERCAN AKBAY

Ercan Akbay was born on 12th February in Istanbul. As a young man he read a lot, admired the contemporary Latin and Anglo-Saxon singer-poets, and started to try composing poetry of his own on a guitar that he taught himself to play in just a few weeks.
Ever since then, he has continued to show the same dilligence in all three arts that he works with. He describes his music, painting and writing as his means of expressing the piquancy of the adventures he has lived through and the complicated state of his inner world.
He started work the same day he started university. After eventful years in the tourism and electronics sectors, he began to work for himself, and soon learnt to view life as a game from having to do so many different things at the same time: He managed a jazz club; he founded companies in various fields; he got involved in financial markets. He has worked in the stock market, real estate, music and ballet production, old film and record restoration, concert and sound recording and film montage, book cover and poster design, and other fields, and still continues to work in some of them today.
After producing 'A Summer's Night', a performance of his spoken and sung poetry telling the story of deep pain and parting, unhealthy passions, death, split personalities and thoughts against the system, all put to music in his own inimitable way in 1989, in 1996 the artist released 'Tales of the Weird', an experimental album based on his book of the same name.
Towards the end of 1997, he wrote 'Men Don't Cry'. Due to both of these books being sold out and a problem with the publishing house he was working with at the time, there was a five-year gap in his life as a writer from 2002. In 2006, he finished his novel, 'What Time is It Mr Wolf?', which had started life as a TV script. In 2007, he reached an agreement to reprint all of his books.
Just as in his paintings, in all his books the writer has a linguistic and narrative style completely his own.xAlvin Parmar Editor