Beyazit Akman is a bestselling novelist of historical fiction and professor of English literature. He earned his M.A. in English literature at Illinois State University, as a Fulbright Scholar in 2006, and completed his Ph.D. at the same university in 2012. In 2010, he was awarded the Smithsonian Baird Society Fellowship in Washington DC. He taught at State University of New York, Geneseo, as a visiting professor from 2012 to 2014. He started writing historical fiction after years of archival research at university libraries in the United States. His first novel, 1453: The Conquest, was an instant success and became one of the bestselling novels for a first-time author in his native Turkey. It has become a contemporary classic and has inspired many historical TV series, movies and novels, and launched a new era of historical fiction in Turkey. He is currently an assistant professor of English literature at the Social Sciences University of Ankara.