He is the son of political journalist Burhan Asaf Belge (who was married to Hungarian-American socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor from May 1935Marriage entry, 17 May 1935 Budapest 11th district, 172/1935 to December 1941), nephew of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, and the grandson of a former governor of Bursa. He received his Ph.D. from Istanbul University in 1969 on leftist criticism in English literature.Academic profile , Istanbul Bilgi University From his student years in the 1960s, until the early 1980s, he had been an active participant of a close-knit left-wing group of scholars at Istanbul University's Department of English Language and Literature; he used to be a Marxist himself. His fellow scholars of those years included Berna Moran, Mina Urgan, Cevat Capan, Aksit Gokturk and Vahit Turhan. After the military coups of 1971 and 1980, he was compelled to leave academic life and began publishing left-wing classics with Iletisim Press in Istanbul.
