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

In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “tensile strength” of materials. You can treat the Hadley short story as that sort of device in itself. Precision engineered and finely calibrated, it stress-tests not only marriages and affairs but memories, desires, even identities, with episodes of crisis and discovery that reveal each fault-line or fracture.

Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he was in his early 50s and so instantly successful that he was able to give up his career in the Department of the Environment to write full time. Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig, the floppy-eared freedom-fighting heroes of Watership Down, kept him in comfort for the rest of his life.

When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’s seared into the American psyche and has been a set text for decades. It was published in the New Yorker in 1948 and generated more mail – about 300 letters, mainly horrified - than any work of fiction the magazine had published.

My mother has been rediscovered, if she ever went away. She is suddenly a rising star, 51 years after her early death. Interest in Shirley Jackson’s novels and stories has blossomed significantly in recent decades, but her new stardom really hit me when I recently walked onto the set of a new feature film adaptation of her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There, in a 300-year-old Manor House in County Wicklow, where nearly all the movie was filmed, sat a well-worn copy of my mother’s book on the director’s monitor console.

I am writing this in the sun after many days on the trot spent from morning until 11 at night in Jane Eyre’s wonderful new home at the National Theatre. During previews we work every day, refining, changing, have a quick dinner break and then perform a preview performance. It’s the culmination of over two years of living with this story, since Sally Cookson first contacted me in late spring 2013 to discuss her plan to turn this extraordinary book into a piece of theatre.

The Nobel prize-winning writer, playwright and artist Günter Grass was arguably the best-known German-language author of the second half of the 20th century. Kate Connolly met him in May 2010 in Istanbul where, after attending a series of literary events, Grass was forced to stay on for some days as volcanic ash closed European airports.

Born in 1927 in the port city of Danzig in what is now Gdansk in Poland, he was among the hundreds of thousands of ethnic German refugees who settled in West Germany in 1945. His literary career started with his debut novel, The Tin Drum (1959), which remains his most famous work. It formed the first part of his Danzig Trilogy and is steeped in European magic realism. The book was adapted for the screen by Volker Schlöndorff in 1979. Like many of his novels it deals with the rise of Nazism and the experience of war.

Hooray! The BBC has learned its lesson from the "Mumblegate" furore that erupted around last year's adaptation of Jamaica Inn, and ensured that even the most unwashed and toothless Cornish yokel in this all-new Poldark is almost 90 per cent intelligible. As the central character Ross Poldark, Aidan Turner (of Hobbit fame) is a model of robust actorly diction. 

Hilary Mantel is a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Its successor, the just as sturdy Bring Up the Bodies, followed it onto the Booker rostrum three years later - the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, which started in Stratford, proceeded to the West End and this year goes to Broadway. And now the BBC has adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. For a novelist who has suffered more than most for her art, this double victory for Mantel comes as a remarkable validation.

Alexander McCall Smith is Scottish, and writes fiction, but he doesn’t write “Scottish fiction” as most of us understand the term. In his world view there are no used needles and discarded condoms littering tenement stairwells, no spotty hedonists popping pills to a blue-streaked soundtrack of effing and cussing. It seems extraordinary that no other author has hit upon his extraordinarily successful formula for shifting units in bookshops all over the world.