I was 11 years old when my father was killed. A body was found near the border between Turkey and Bulgaria. According to authorities it belonged to my father even though the corpse was decomposed beyond recognition. My mother and his mother were not summoned to identify the body. This tragedy happened in 1948. We still don’t know where he was buried. Therefore he does not have a grave. My mother and I waited for him for years hoping that he might appear one day. My mother died in 1999.

Sabahattin Ali was a well-known writer who had already published a volume of poetry, four volumes of short stories and three novels between 1935 and 1945 as well as numerous articles published in periodicals, newspapers, magazines and was the editor and owner of a very popular political-satirical newspaper called Marco Pasha. (Pictured below: Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat)

He was born in 1907 in a town called Egridere, which used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, where his father was the Commander of the Ottoman Army Headquarters during the disastrous defeat of the Balkan War. It is now in Bulgaria and called Ardino. As a child of one war after another, Sabahattin Ali didn’t have much of a happy family life. When he was 12 years old, he was sent to a boarding Teachers’ School where he started to compose his first poems which were published in provincial literary magazines.

The young Turkish Republic was desperately in need of educators. The country has lost a whole generation of its best people during endless wars. In 1925 an Education Abroad program has been put into effect. Sabahattin Ali was one of the chosen students sent to Germany to learn the language. Between 1928 and 1930 he spent two years in Berlin and Potsdam where the political and artistic climate of the Weimar Republic was at its pinnacle. While in Germany it seems that he was artistically, politically and intellectually reborn. 

He returned to Turkey with a political awareness leaning toward Marxism and socialism. This was obviously not what the new regime expected from him. During the first years of his teaching career he was accused of inciting subversive political ideas among his students, arrested more than once and sentenced to a year in prison for a poem he allegedly wrote criticising the leader of the regime.

When he was free again he decided to get married and start a new, tame and tranquil life. My mother was an ideal choice for a man who was seeking tranquillity. They married in 1935 and I was born in 1937. We were a happy family as long as it lasted. (Pictured: Filiz Ali with her parents in a prison courtyard in 1947, after Satahattin Ali was arrested for criticising President Atatürk.)

My father was a gentle man with endless energy who talked, walked and wrote faster than anybody I know. He didn’t need solitude for reading or writing. He would read and write anywhere, any time. Even though he was frequently the life of a party, being very funny, a good mimic, imitating comic characters, telling hilarious stories, jokes, singing funny songs, he had moments of closing himself to the outer world like a clam as well. But his curiosity and hunger for knowledge was phenomenal. I am thankful that he is being rediscovered by a whole new generation now.

• Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe) is published by Penguin Modern Classics (£8.99)
• More First Person articles on theartsdesk

Overleaf: read the opening of Madonna in a Fur Coat

Love is in the air. Today, men and women and boys and girls will be pondering how to say it with roses and cards and candlelit dinners: those three words that contain multitudes. As the old strip cartoon never quite got round to saying, love is... the human condition, which is why a good quantity of the culture we review on this site has to do with it. To help you get into the mood for romancing, we have asked our writers to identify something - anything - in the arts that embodies the L word. There are some obvious choices, some obscure ones, and a whole lot of omissions. So, in the comment box at the bottom of the page, please let us know what you would include in the list.

Casablanca (1942)

"Where I’m going, you can’t follow." Bogart-Bergman. Just for once, won’t Rick just let his heart hold sway? But no. Casablanca teaches us that the best cynics follow a higher order, their better natures. In that wonderful final moment, Bergman’s eyes and Bogart’s drawl create the perfect magnetic field. Gets me every time. Carole Woddis

"Some Enchanted Evening", South Pacific [1949]

As lush and emotionally expansive a song as the musical theatre knows, this breakout hit from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s tale of wartime romance builds to a pitch of such sustained ecstasy as to make immediate lovers of all who hear it. And leave it to Oscar Hammerstein II to come up with a lyric worth of Shakespeare in “fools give you reasons / wise men never try”.  I'll swoon to that. Matt Wolf

Brassaï: Lovers in a Café on the Place d'Italie, Paris (1932)

The Transylvanian photographer was the "eye of Paris", photographing everybody and everything from prostitutes to socialites, from Picasso to graffiti - and lovers. The delight of the couple, who look thoroughly experienced, is reflected in the café mirrors: flirtatious, tender, determined and accompanied by those essential accessories, wine, coffee, cigarettes, with the kiss just about to happen. Marina Vaizey

In a Lonely Place (1950)

Hadda Brooks is singing the blues "I Hadn't Anyone 'til You" in a Hollywood jazz bar. Languorously smoking at the opposite end of her grand piano, Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) can't stop appreciating each other – their lovemaking, which occurred perhaps an hour before, has left them in a satiated haze. When Dix lights a cigarette and pops it between Laurel's lips, then whispers something in her ear, she smiles naughtily. Their eyes indicate they are the only two people in the world, though the director Nicholas Ray pulls back the camera to show the room is full of lovers. It couldn't possibly last, for Grahame and Ray (whose marriage was collapsing), for Dix and Laurel, for any of us. But there, for a moment, is Intimacy Incarnate. Graham Fuller

Chet Baker: "My Funny Valentine" (1959)

If your love’s looks are laughable, there’s no better way to say so than Rodgers’ and Hart’s touching expression of quirky love. Miles Davis’ 1965 version is surely the most sophisticated, and there’s always Sinatra for the full treacle, but Chet Baker’s fragile, wispy, meandering voice captures the vulnerability perfectly. As a YouTuber comments beneath this video: “No technique. No vibrato. No range. Sketchy pitch. And absolutely beautiful.” Matthew Wright

The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

This is love as the road not taken. Clint Eastwood's film of the novel by Robert James Waller, about a sudden passion in the autumn of middle age, cast himself as a National Geographic photographer wandering into the life of Meryl Streep's Italian war bride in rural Iowa for four days of exquisite pleasure, then a lifetime of pain. Instead of diving out the car into the rain (see clip below), she does the decent thing and internalises his memory, and what could be more romantic than that? A Brief Encounter for the sexually incontinent Clinton era. Jasper Rees

Wayne County & the Electric Chairs: “Eddie & Sheena” (1978)

When cross-dressing eccentric Wayne County – later Jayne County – arrived in London from New York in 1977 to horn in on the punk scene, he immediately made a mark by naming his band The Electric Chairs. His first single was topped with the charming “F** Off”: refrain “If you don’t want to f*** me, f*** off”. Two releases on, in 1978, he had mellowed with “Eddie & Sheena”, the actually charming tale of the forbidden romance and marriage of teddy boy Eddie and punk rocker Sheena. Kieron Tyler

Constantin Brancusi: The Kiss (1916)

Brancusi carved his first version of The Kiss in 1907. It was a theme the Romanian-born sculptor returned to again and again, each time simplifying his depiction of the entwined lovers. Working briefly as Rodin’s assistant (though he soon left because “nothing grows under large trees”), Brancusi took the older artist’s naturalistic and erotically charged representation of the illicit lovers encountered in Dante’s Inferno to create a proto-Cubist, “primitivistic” masterpiece which is at once much sweeter and more innocent in tone and sentiment. Fisun Güner

Frederick Ashton: La Fille mal gardée (1960)

Ballet's most erotic moment - Lise, Widow Simone’s disobedient daughter, is locked into the house with the newly harvested corn-stacks and the menace of an unwanted marriage. She sadly mimes her dreams of true love and babies - when out of the cornstacks jumps her boyfriend, hidden among them. She’s horribly embarrassed. He gently kisses up one arm, then the other, more sexily. An orgiastic pas de deux is threatened... But Mother’s on the way back. Ismene Brown

Dirty Dancing (1987)

Yes, it's corny, but boy, is it sexy; two lovers meet across the social divide as holiday-camp dancer Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) teaches prissy Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey) how to loosen up and dance. And that moment, at the very end of the film, when Johnny mouths the words “And I owe it all to you” as they dance to “(I've Had) The Time of My Life” - meltdown. Veronica Lee

 Ibrahim Ferrer: "Dos Gardenias"

“With these two gardenias I mean to say ‘I love you, I adore you”. “Dos Gardenias“ was a famous bolero written by Isolina Carrillo in the 1930s. Ibrahim Ferrer leant the song while playing with the Cuban bandleader Benny Moré, although in his earlier bands he only sang the fast numbers as his Santiago de Cuba accent from the east of the island was deemed inappropriate for romantic songs. What is poignant in the song is the transitoriness of the flowers, and indeed Ferrer was all too conscious of the fleeting, precious nature of love and life. Peter Culshaw

Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

There’s a particular scene in Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy that wrenches the heart every time. Beatrice and Benedick, after a campaign of whispers and rumours orchestrated by their friends, finally admit they adore each other. “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest,” declares Emma Thompson’s Beatrice to Branagh (at the time her real-life husband). Of course, this being Shakespeare, she then orders him to prove his love for her by killing his best friend... Caroline Crampton

Tchaikovsky/Bourne: Swan Lake Pas de deux (1875, 1995)

Poor old Pyotr Ilyich would have been amazed to see two men dancing his great Odette/Siegfried lovescene together with such tenderness – not a version likely to be seen in Russia today, though Matthew Bourne’s company did have an unhappy tour there. Bourne has often said that it’s not necessarily, or just, a gay romance: his prince’s longing for a masculine swan may just be reaching out for wildness and freedom from stifling convention. Everyone can understand that. But there’s a great love here in the taming of Adam Cooper’s dangerous beast, the coming-together as the solo cello finally joins the soaring violin (originally soprano and tenor in the operatic love duet Tchaikovsky adapted for his ballet). And the final moment where the swan carries the prince in his arms perhaps reminds us of Tom Daley’s odd coming-out speech when he said his lover made him feel "safe". David Nice

Dexter Gordon: "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" (1962)

"S'il vous plaît, I would like to have the same thing he had." In the 1986 Tavernier film Round Midnight, Dexter Gordon in the character of Dale asked for a drink to make him fall over. Back in 1962, before leaving New York, he recorded this ballad of unrequited love for Blue Note, to make anyone lonely on Valentine's Day reach for their third Martini. Playing live, Dexter would have recited the words of the song before playing it. Tearfully, divinely, unforgettably. Sebastian Scotney

Continued overleaf

On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not yet stirred. The door swung open to reveal, lying on the bed, a young woman in a cotton dress rolled over on her side, an older supine man wearing a jaunty moustache and a punctilious tie. The woman’s body was still warm.

The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which we live. Globalisation has defined the 20th and 21st century and while the future is uncertain, one thing we can sure about is that it will continue to become ever more inter-connected.

John Hurt, who has died at the age of 77, belonged to that great generation of British thespians who started in the 1960s and eventually, one by one, ended up knighted: Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Nigel Hawthorne, Derek Jacobi. Of them all, Hurt was the outsider. It’s impossible to imagine an alien springing from any midriff but his.

It was a good night for British thespians at the 2016 Golden Globes. The stars of The Night Manager – Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman – all visited the podium to collect awards.

The cello is so deeply engrained in my fingers, my imagination, it’s part of my being – my life would feel amputated without it. You fall in love with the instrument, the music, and then you embark on the life-long task of trying to get closer to that beguiling musical ideal. That’s the drug, the contract you sign with the devil. Every day I think how lucky I am that I can dive into a score and work at it physically.

Forty years ago, BBC Radio Cymru – the one and only Welsh-language national radio station – was born. It broke free from the world of opt-outs, where you might emerge from listening, say, to The Archers and stumble across a Welsh-language documentary, before being safely returned to Radio 4 Wales. Creating a radio station that broadcast fully in Welsh was long overdue, said its fans; it was in danger of becoming a ghetto for Welsh-language programming, said others.