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  • PEN Atlas: literary dispatches from Turkey

    Maureen Freely introduces an exclusive new e-book from PEN Atlas
    , collecting some of the best dispatches from Turkey, at a moment when the country is in the midst of great changes, both political and literary

    There was a time, and it was not very long ago, when even our best-informed and most outward-looking readers could not name a single Turkish writer. In 2004, when Orhan Pamuk achieved quite sudden world fame with his sixth novel (his fourth to be translated into English), more than a few of his reviewers expressed astonishment that a country ‘like that’ could produce a writer of his sophistication. His subsequent prosecution for insulting Turkishness only served to encourage the belief that he must be an aberration, owing nothing to the cultural void from which the knights of world literature had rescued him. This illusion was disrupted by the arrival of Elif Shafak who, though writing in a very different vein, with very different takes on religion, feminism, and indeed literature, was just as good at taking stories rooted in Turkey to world audiences.That and the growing popularity of Turkey as a holiday destination made readers more curious.  The number of Turkish authors being translated into English went from 11 in the last decade of the last century to 41 in the first decade of this one, and 25 in the last three years alone.In the past year, more than 20 Turkish writers have come to this island to launch or speak about their work. Most came under the auspices of the British Council, working in conjunction with the Turkish Ministry of Culture, the London Book Fair, English PEN, and other dedicated partners. There were more than 30 events in 15 venues across 4 UK cities. Most were about literature, not politics, though politics is never far away in the lives and works of Turkish writers. For those who wished to engage more deeply with such questions, there was a roundtable on freedom of expression hosted by English PEN at which a diverse group of Turkish novelists, poets, publishers, and journalists met an equally diverse group of London-based novelists, lawyers, and activists.At this and the many other events I attended, either as a participant or a member of a standing-room only audience, there was one question that kept coming back. Why has it taken the English-speaking world so long to notice Turkey? There is, of course, no single answer. You might say that – especially since the end of the Second World War – it has been very hard to read. Like many of the new nations in the Cold War era, it was economically weak, but it never had to liberate itself from an empire. Before becoming a republic, it was an empire. It was also, officially, a democracy, but with a military that was not shy to step in and shut it down whenever it deemed necessary. It was staunchly anti-Communist, and staunchly authoritarian. It is still authoritarian, except that now the enforcers are not secularists but Islamists.In Turkey today, as in Turkey yesterday, you pick up a pen at your own risk. Though the tradition of speaking truth to power is old and rich, the conversation was until very recently constrained, even kettled. The penal code is still full of laws that can send writers to prison. The new anti-terror laws and the expanding definitions of terrorism now allow for the indefinite detention of writers viewed as dangerous. But that has not silenced Turkey’s dissenting writers, who continue to speak out for democratic change with ever greater ingenuity, imagination, and force.During the recent Gezi protests, the Turkish mainstream media stayed at home. The media moguls were too deeply involved in the ruling party’s development deals to risk angering an increasingly autocratic prime minister. It was the social media that kept the protesters in touch, and (thanks to the efforts of a spontaneous army of Twitter translators) it connected them with the outside world as never before.So today we are publishing an e-book containing our first collection of dispatches, commissioned and posted by PEN Atlas over the past year. Some come from writers who have already seen their books published in English; some are appearing in English for the first time. Some have been translated; some were composed in English. Quite a few were written from the heat of the Gezi protests; others offer quiet reflections, mining the past, or imagining the future. All are open letters, inviting us to write back.From Mario Levi and Hakan Gunday to Kaya Genc and Ayfer Tunc, this collection offers many riches and insights and invites you to read further.About the authorMaureen Freely is the author of seven novels (Mother’s Helper, The Life of the Party, The Stork Club, Under the Vulcania, The Other Rebecca, Enlightenment and – most recently – Sailing through Byzantium) as well as three works of non-fiction (Pandora’s Clock, What About Us? An Open Letter to the Mothers Feminism Forgot, and The Parent Trap). The translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (Snow, The Black Book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colours and The Museum of Innocence), she is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She also works with campaigns aiming to promote world literature in English translation. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. 

  • On #OccupyGezi, the Turkish Government prefers conspiracy theories to engagement

    Oray Egin reports on Turkey’s ‘dissident witch hunt’.

    On Monday 5th August 2013, Turkish courts finally reached a decision on the most controversial trial to date. The Ergenekon investigation, which was launched in 2007, initially aimed to disclose an alleged clandestine organization that plots to overthrow the government. But over time, the investigation widened to include many opponents of Turkey’s pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party government including prominent university professors, party leaders, well-known journalists, ex-military personnel and a former chief of staff. They were all sentenced to life in prison.

    Most of the Ergenekon suspects were already behind bars. But the court also issued an arrest for Merdan Yanardag, the editor-in-chief of a small independent daily Yurt that strongly criticizes the Ergenkon investigation, linking him to the case. The same day, Turkish police also launched a drug investigation that ended up with the arrests of some of Turkey’s most famous actors.

    Coincidence? Some seem to think not. “It’s become a dissident witch hunt,” says Aysenur Arslan, a veteran journalist and a writer for Yurt, on the phone. “I fear this won’t stop. It may lead to ongoing trials concerning journalists. Even the drug raid raises questions in my head. Most of these actors were supporters of the Gezi Protests.”

    As is now well known, the Gezi Park protests started out of environmental consciousness, to save the park from becoming a shopping mall, but quickly evolved into  massive anti-government protests. The police attacked the protesters with tear gas and water cannons, left five people dead, 11 blinded and many wounded.

    Since the protests erupted Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party administration has been mostly focusing on conspiracy theories about the perpetrators of the ‘Occupy Gezi’ movement. At first, Erdogan blamed the ‘global interest rate lobby’ committed to raising Turkey’s borrowing costs for profit. At one point, Turkey’s deputy prime minister said that the Jewish Diaspora were creating unrest in the country. Melih Gökçek, the mayor of Ankara from Erdoğan’s party, went on TV and declared Otpor!, a former youth movement from Serbia, to be behind the uprisings. Gökçek also mentioned Gene Sharp, an expert on non-violent action, as providing the theoretical framework for overthrowing Turkey’s government.

     “I had never heard of Gene Sharp or Otpor! before,” wrote Memet Ali Alabora, a star actor who was at the forefront of the Gezi Park protests, in a statement. On June 10, he had tweeted “It’s not only about Gezi Park, didn’t you still get it, come join us.” This single tweet, and his YouTube video shot in the same park from 2011 explaining Occupy Wall Street to Turkish followers, was enough to put him on the spotlight. Most recently, a Turkish prosecutor demands that Alabora be tried and charged with 20 years for allegedly provoking the protests.

    “I am an actor who is anti-war, an environmentalist, and a believer of freedom of speech and democracy,” he followed in the same statement. “My tweet only reflected my feelings that night and had no political motives.”

    Even Oscar winners like Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn were recently targeted by Turkey’s hotheaded Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan because of their support for Gezi in an ad in the The Times. They co-signed a declaration among a group of intellectuals from PEN’s Vice President Moris Farhi, to Andrew Mango, David Lynch, Tom Stoppard and many more condemning Turkish authorities’ crackdown on Gezi Park protests.

    Erdogan is now planning to sue the Murdoch-owned daily. “The press wants to throw mud to see if it sticks. The Times is renting out its own pages for money,” he recently said. “This is The Times‘ failing. We will pursue legal channels regarding the Times.”

    What the Turkish government fails to understand is that the Gezi Park protests broke out organically, and, indeed, had no political motive from the beginning. As Turkey’s Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk puts it, in a recent interview, “it was not organized [and] political parties were not capable of managing it.”

    To his credit, Turkey went under a rapid democratization process under Erdogan’s decade long reign. He upended the influence of the military over politics, implemented a set of reforms for the country’s Kurdish minority, improved healthcare and boosted the economy. Yet, at the same time he has become increasingly authoritarian and created a country of fear. Not a day goes by without a pro-government media outlet publishing lists of journalists and accusing them of trying to overthrow the government. Turkey is already the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, according to the latest CPJ report. Recently, the Turkish Journalists’ Union announced that at least 72 journalists were fired or forced to leave in the six weeks since the Gezi protests started.

    “I fear the government has totally lost control and is driving the country to a dead end,” Arslan adds. “I only wish that we don’t hit a wall in the end.”

    About the Author

    Oray Egin is a journalist and a writer based in Istanbul and New York. You can follow him on Twitter @orayinenglish

  • A wind blows from Gezi Park

    This week PEN Atlas returns to Turkey for an update on Gezi Park. Müge İplikçi reflects on recent events and draws parallels between the treatment of protestors and the ongoing stifling of Turkish writers, who work in a system in which profit is the only validationTranslated from the Turkish by Feyza HowellThe Gezi Park movement goes far beyond ‘external provocation’, as it’s persistently termed by the Turkish government. It affects everyone, young and old, and it will continue to do so.A few weeks ago, a younger demonstrator told me that this was not an environmental movement – or at least not yet. But I suspect we both actually want the same things: to live in a country where nature and humans coexist, where an individual’s rights and freedoms are sacrosanct, enshrined in an ethical framework, and where reason prevails, without interference from any hierarchy.After all, the Gezi Park movement is much more than an excuse for environmental activists to flock to the streets. The real impetus has been a general struggle against a stifling atmosphere –  the increasing interference with our homes, our bodies and our independence. This has included a conservative shift in our education system; the censorship of books; a ‘single voice’ imposed on the Press; and a profits-first policy imposed on the Arts under the guise of ‘privatisation’. In all likelihood, the last straw came with the rapid transformation of the country into a property bubble.But something unexpected happened as the panzer tanks raided Gezi Park on the night of June the 15th
    . We, the older generation, were well acquainted with state violence in a way that the 90s generation have never been, or needed to be. (I call such violence the official language of the state: a language that feeds on censorship and lies.) This was perhaps the first time the younger generation really understood what minorities had to face. One young person regretted his earlier suspicion of gay people, while another exclaimed, ‘Now I understand why the Kurds fled to the mountains!’Fascinating moments and encounters like these have a new address now. A place that inspires innovative protests and – more crucially – teaches us to overcome our fears. Take the ‘standing man’. One day, a solitary young man stood still for hours in Taksim Square, next to Gezi Park. Others joined him. The following day, there were more. In a few days, people were standing still everywhere. They stood still reading books, in silent protest at police violence. They stood to exercise their rights as citizens.Although the state expelled the protestors from the park on June the 15th
    – physically, if not in spirit – the action paradoxically gave rise to hundreds of Gezi Parks. The movement endures, through a variety of initiatives, and as it does it brings about change: both social and political.I won’t deny however that this has all been a terrible ordeal. There’s little need to elaborate on the fug of tear-gas or the police truncheons that we’ve had to face. But for writers, the worst has been on the agenda for years: the relationship between neo-liberal policies and moderate Islam, a relationship with an infinite appetite for expansion.Our work has no real value in such an environment, where profit is the only validation. This has led to yet another type of censorship, one perpetrated by the publishers and the media. All that matters is how your work stands in the marketplace. You are trapped by an undetectable boundary of your visibility, sales and promotion. This is reinforced by a superficial publishing industry and its followers, who place focus on how visible you are. This vicious circle explains why good literature struggles to reach the reader. Over the last decade, good literature has become marginalised before our very eyes, in a process that is now accepted as the norm.For some time, the possibility of breaking free from the vicious circle has been occupying my mind. That is, until very recently. Because now there is a new phenomenon at the heart of the nation: Gezi Park, a resistance that is continuing as I write these words.This movement has the potential for great change, and one whose impact will be felt on the wider literary scene. I don’t necessarily mean writers will gain a wider readership. Rather that there is a chance that readers might think more, and think more deeply – and this in turn might lead to an end to writers’ alienation from their work.I am convinced that this period of deeper thinking will inspire us all, and literature will have its part to play. A nation that can defy its government’s ‘blank cheque’ attitude towards politics might also defy such an attitude coming from other parts of the political and cultural establishment.That is, so long as we writers continue to create, without compromise between integrity and the marketplace. The acclaimed writer Oğuz Atay once said, ‘I am here, Dear Reader! Where are you?’ I am convinced that the reader is there – learning solidarity, learning how to resist the system, developing an awareness of culture. The reader will eventually respond and welcome us.And this might easily mean that everything changes. A paradigm shift in reading would entail a shift in our very perception of life…Could that really be?Recent events have demonstrated that anything is possible.About the AuthorMüge İplikçi was born in Istanbul. A graduate of Istanbul University English Language and Literature Department, İplikci received MA degrees in Women’s Studies from Istanbul University’s Women’s Studies Department and The Ohio State University. İplikci made her mark at a young age, winning the prestigious Yaşar Nabi Nayır Young Author Award in 1996. She has since published four short story collections and three novels, as well as two books of non-fiction. A widely translated short story author, İplikci’s highly creative stories, which are often tinged with, if not doused in, the post-modern, usually revolve around apparently mundane human relationships, and especially the women in them. İplikci has been a member of Writers in Prison Committee (WIPC) of Turkish PEN for 3 years, and has also been the chairperson of the PEN Turkish Women Writers Committee since 2007.About the TranslatorFeyza Howell works as a literary translator as well as serving English PEN as an assessor and a number of public agencies as an interpreter. She has been translating fiction and commercial texts for many years as well as writing copy and non-fiction, including Waste by Hakan Günday and her translation of Madame Atatürk by İpek Çalışlar, which is due for publication by Saqi in the autumn.

  • On the sublimation of authority

    PEN Atlas continues its focus on Turkey this week, in light of ongoing unrest throughout the country. In this  dispatch, Hakan Günday unpacks the notion of authority and censorship, and considers its effects on civilians 

    Translated from the Turkish by Feyza Howell

    All authority has a natural tendency to ultimately vaporise, utilising every tool at its disposal. The fundamental purpose of this tendency is to disperse authority molecules throughout the atmosphere for the governed to inhale in order that submission may be transformed into accepted behaviour. Thus, as authority spreads itself like waves of fog, the governed lose the ability to identify who actually makes their decisions: they themselves, or the authorities? And, in time, they grow to accept their new situation as the norm, turning into the unwitting enforcers of self-censorship. It is at this point that the bodies and minds of those governed display the traces of the aforementioned inhalation, no matter how deftly authority may have evaded criticism -direct or indirect- by simply concealing itself. Art works as a disclosing tool, in certain circumstances, to reveal these fingerprint-like traces.

    Remaining visible is a potential threat for authority, marking it as a target for reaction, and thus hindering its reign. Fully aware of this danger, authority seeks invisibility; the more it does so, the more effective a fingerprint powder art becomes, disclosing to the open eye the stains of oppression on which it’s sprinkled. That’s when the governed notice the traces of authority on their own bodies and minds and try to free themselves of this ‘foreign matter’ they’d been carrying unawares.

    These traces, in addition, indicate a spiritual loss rather than a material one, in contrast to those left behind by a random burglar: not the theft of a laptop, but rather of liberty.

    Authority is the explanation behind the transformation of the compassionate going to sleep and waking up as brutes. Tolerance may have closed its eyes questioning, entered dreamland querying the prosecution, and opens its eyes as bigotry… All manners of authority stain humans from the moment they they’re born, and life is the struggle to purify oneself from these stains.

    It’s only when authority uses a gas bomb -for instance- to permeate the governed that the natural chemistry of the human body and mind rejects this at once. The aforementioned gas, being unable to disperse in open air, congregates at one point, revealing authority that is made concrete anew as hanging in the void, swinging naked. No different from the moment when a burglar is caught red-handed, and therefore no fingerprint powder is required for identification. Authority stands like a leaden cloud, its intransigence and sickness in full view. 

    Now all that the governed needs to do to see it is raise their heads, but staring at it is a problem. A medical problem. Because the true face of authority is too dangerous to look upon with the naked eye, too perilous to touch with the bare hand. Which is why the following personal safety equipment is essential before attempting the above-mentioned actions: a helmet, swimming goggles, protective facemask, a pair of work gloves and sufficient quantities of antacid solution.

    As İstiklal Road would shed its leaves onto Taksim Square, so did the resistance flock to it, a five-minute walk from the verdant Gezi Park. Accessories were essential from the first night onwards, the 31st of May. Accessories that serve to protect, contrary to popular misconception, not from the effects of tear gas, but from the germs of authority. The resistance was fully aware that such an infection would manifest itself with equal violence in response to police brutality; this first symptom would poison their peaceful movement. The superhuman determination to stay sterile and thus fend off authority’s attempts to sideline the resistance is extraordinary.

    Consequently, the Gezi Park Resistance -whose ecological demands went up in the smoke of their torched tents on what was only the second day of their action- and has today become a ‘Protest to Earn the Right to Protest’ is a poem, not a story, in the history of protest on the freedom of expression. A poem written by the object of its own tribute: the activists still resisting, sustaining injuries and losing their lives…

    About the Author

    Hakan Günday was born in Rhodes in 1976. He finished his primary education in Brussels. After attending Ankara Tevfik Fikret High School, he studied at the Department of French Translation in the Faculty of Literature of Hacettepe University. He then transferred to Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    About the Translator

    Feyza Howell works as a literary translator as well as serving English PEN as assessor and a number of public agencies as interpreter. She has been translating fiction and commercial texts for many years as well as writing copy and non-fiction, including Waste by Hakan Günday and her translation of Madame Atatürk by İpek Çalışlar is due for publication by Saqi in the autumn.

  • The Walnut Tree of Gezi Park

    Following recent events, PEN Atlas is running an additional dispatch this week from Turkey. Kaya Genç writes for us about Nâzım Hikmet Ran, whose poem ‘The Walnut Tree’ has taken on a prophetic turn and an inspirational one in light of Gezi Park

    Nâzım Hikmet Ran, who died fifty years ago this week on June 3 1963, was one of the most sophisticated poets of Turkish language. His reputation as a romantic communist seems uncomplicated on the face of it. His works, however, attest to an author whose ideas were far from simple: a communist who was fascinated by the minutiae of industrialization; a poet who preached art for the masses while devoting his verses to elaborate philosophical discussions with figures as demanding as George Berkeley and Karl Marx.  

    Born in the then Ottoman-ruled Thessaloniki in 1902, Hikmet studied at a Naval Academy before traveling to Anatolia to join the anti-imperialist resistance movement. From there he moved to Moscow where he witnessed the foundation of the Soviet Union. Inspired by Futurists and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s modernist experiments he returned to Turkey where a nasty surprise awaited him in the form of an increasingly authoritarian regime. The new ruling elite, which trampled all dissent after 1925, picked on Hikmet; as a result he spent more than twelve years in Turkish prisons. After he finally decided to flee to Moscow in 1950, a newspaper printed his picture on its cover, urging its readers to spit on it. He was denationalized a few days later.

    The sheer range of Hikmet’s interests was fascinating. Although he spent almost a fourth of his life under confinement he had a ravenous appetite for current affairs, artistic movements and women from all nationalities. With their multiple perspectives his epic city poems bring to mind Dziga Vertov’s filmic experiments. In “The Epic of Kuvayi Milliye” he narrated the war of independence from the perspectives of ordinary people of Anatolia, challenging the official historiography of the state. As an extremely well-read poet he challenged a number other things, too. Hikmet was too clever, too bright, too passionate. Whatever happened on earth interested him; like a journalist he was quick to react to events. When the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima he described this atrocity from the posthumous point of view of a seven year old child (“I’m only seven though I died / In Hiroshima long ago / I’m seven now as I was then / When children die they do not grow”) and from that of a fisherman (“A young Japanese fisherman was killed / by a cloud at sea. / I heard this song from his friends, / one lurid yellow evening on the Pacific.”) 

    Hikmet’s love poems make good reading; as a young man I effectively made use of them while courting girls. Indeed, I have never met a Turkish girl who didn’t react to Hikmet’s love poems in a positive way. Being a reader of Hikmet provided me with the double advantage of appearing politically and sexually mature.

    Last week I remembered Hikmet, like thousands of others who opposed the cutting of trees in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. One of his most popular poems, “The Walnut Tree”, had a contemporary resonance here: “I am a walnut tree in Gulhane Park / My leaves are nimble, nimble like fish in water / My leaves are sheer, sheer like a silk handkerchief / pick, wipe, my rose, the tear from your eyes / My leaves are my hands, I have one hundred thousand / I touch you with one hundred thousand hands, I touch Istanbul / My leaves are my eyes, I look in amazement / I watch you with one hundred thousand eyes, I watch Istanbul / Like one hundred thousand hearts, beat, beat my leaves / I am a walnut tree in Gulhane Park / neither you are aware of this, nor the police.” Hundreds of people chanting those verses to defend the cutting of trees in an Istanbul park—perhaps this was a fitting way to pay tribute to his memory.

     

    About the Author

    Kaya Genç is a Turkish novelist and essayist. He specializes in late-Victorian authors and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Conrad, Wilde and Stevenson. Newsweek Turkey named him as one of Turkish literature’s 20 under 40. His essays appeared, both in print and online, in the Guardian, London Review of Books, Songlines, Sight & Sound, Index on Censorship, the Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Millions and many others. He translated ten books into Turkish (Tom McCarthy’s C, among others), writes both in his native tongue and in English and lives in Istanbul.

    Additional Information

    You can follow Kaya Genç on Twittter.

    For more on Kaya Genç and his writing visit his website.

     

  • Taking a stand

    Oray Egin reports on the continuing protests in Turkey, why they began in Gezi Park and what the writers of the country owe to those marching on the streets

    It was a small, insignificant park at the centre of Istanbul. For years it served as a gay cruising area at night, but during the day families with children spent time there as it was one of the last remaining green spaces. Many couples got married at the adjacent registry office. Almost all Istanbulians have memories in the park, but none of these mattered to the administration of the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (the AKP). Their decade-long rule of Turkey brought along a construction boom, and the Gezi Park was the latest to face a similar destiny.

    Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first conceived of a construction project at the site of the park when he was the mayor of Istanbul, in the early 90s. He didn’t get enough support then, but as a powerful premier, with 50 per cent support from the electorate, he revisited his original idea. His wish was to rebuild the Ottoman era military barracks torn down by the 50s government to make way for green space. “It may be a hotel, or a residence with shops on the ground floor,” Erdoğan recently announced.

    Urban transformation projects in Turkey rarely involve public opinion, therefore the bulldozers entered the Gezi Park without much delay after Erdoğan’s statements. But that tiny park triggered a country-wide demonstration against the government when a small group, of about 20 to 30 people, stood against the bulldozers and saved a tree.

    Soon after, the word got out via Twitter and involved more people frustrated with the government’s policies – not only environmental, but an accumulation of frustration. Thousands marched to Taksim Square, where the Gezi Park is located, and similar protests erupted in dozens of other Turkish cities. Police dealt brutally with protesters using tear gas bombs and water cannons. There are numerous injuries, including a protester who lost an eye, and even a civilian casualty.

    Turkey’s media, out of fear of the government, remained silent for days. The country’s first privately owned news network, NTV, became the focus of heavy criticism. The network is part of a large conglomerate which also owns Garanti Bank, one of the largest in Turkey. On Monday, its shares dropped 9 per cent and more than 1,500 customers closed their accounts. The network’s executive issued an apology the next day: “We were wrong.”

    “It’s significant that the protest started over a tree,” says Buket Uzuner, a novelist who’s working on a quartet inspired by nature. “But of course, it is not only about a park, all of us are frustrated. And for the first time in ten years we’ve had the will to say enough.”

    Indeed, the Gezi Park protests were ignited because of the government’s increasingly authoritarian rule and threats to secular lifestyles. Just recently, a bill banning alcohol sales from 10pm until 6am was passed by the government. A symbol of the Istanbul Film Festival, the historic Emek Theatre, was torn down and is now being converted into a shopping mall. Added to this is the intimidation of free press.

    “For me one of the biggest issues is censorship and self-censorship,” adds Uzuner. “I was writing in the 70s as well, during military rule, and I can honestly say that the pressure wasn’t as severe as today.”

    Most recently, many of Turkey’s leading writers, including Uzuner, O.Z. Livaneli, Latife Tekin, Mehmet Murat Somer, Ece Temelkuran and Ayse Kulin signed a petition calling for an independent council to be formed that will hear the people’s demands and stop police brutality. “I believe that among those protesters are people who grew up reading my books,” says Uzuner. “I owe it to them to raise my voice, support them, and even march with them.”

    About the Author

    Oray Egin is a journalist and a writer based in Istanbul and New York. You can follow him on Twitter @orayinenglish

    Additional Information

    This special edition of PEN Atlas is in response to events in Turkey, and will be followed by a piece tomorrow by Mario Levi on The Sounds of Istanbul.