EARLY YEARS
Alein Kentigerna took his first steps into literature through poetry, beginning to write his earliest verses in 1992. By 1994, he had turned to novel writing, and in 2001 he officially entered the literary world with a poem published in the magazine Öteki-Siz. A year later, the poems he submitted to Varlık under the pen name Alper Atılgan were praised by Küçük İskender as “the work of a master.”
FIRST NOVELS AND ATTEMPTS
Before publishing his first novel, he wrote more than 3,000 pages of drafts, keeping his notes by hand and on a Silver Reed typewriter. His literary journey as a novelist began in 2007, with his first book released under the pen name Mehmet Atılgan. Works published under that name include:
The Throat-Slasher Enkebit (Panama)
Barbarossa (Timaş)
Godless (İthaki)Wilhem Çelebi → (forthcoming)
THE ALEIN KENTIGERNA PERIOD
Under the name Alein Kentigerna, he went on to publish the following works:
Messengers of the Apocalypse
The Prophet of Death
Hallucination)
The Abyss of Secrets
The Sleep of Snakes
The Psychopathic Children of God
Diary of a Psychopath
The Town
Still Missing a Victim
The turning point that would shape Kentigerna’s literary path came in August 1994, in the village of Çambaşı, Denizli. His relative, Süleyman Aktaş—known in the press as the “Nail Killer”—committed a series of murders that left an indelible mark on the young writer’s imagination. Spending those days at his grandmother’s house, only fifty meters from where the killings took place, he would later call it his “week of crimson light.”
Though he later used the red light as a metaphor, for him it was undeniably real. For throughout that week, as the murders unfolded, what he described as the devil’s light flooded his room until dawn, whispering to him a name: “Y…….… D……….” By the week’s end, when the victims’ graves were exhumed and Aktaş was proven to be the true killer, the crimson light and the voices that had haunted him vanished—yet not without leaving a scar that altered the course of his life.
This early encounter with death’s shadow, demonic whispers, and nightmares laid the foundation for the gothic atmosphere that would define his later novels. His studies on schizophrenia and serial killers would guide him toward writing his first novel under the name Alein Kentigerna: Hallucination.
TODAY
As of 2023, he is 44 years old—
and still claims that he “continues to see the whisper of the red light.”