I’m the author of four books: The Lion and the Nightingale, Under the Shadow, An Istanbul Anthology, and Macera. The Economist called Under the Shadow a ‘refreshingly balanced’ book whose author ‘has announced himself as a voice to be listened to’. The Times Literary Supplement praised the way The Lion and the Nightingale ‘grounds Turkish current affairs in the context of the past couple of decades and explains the attraction of extreme politics to the country’s youth’. I contributed to the world’s leading journals and newspapers, including two front-page stories in The New York Times, cover stories in The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and The Times Literary Supplement.
I wrote...
The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey
By
Kaya Genç
What is my book about?
In 2017 novelist and essayist Kaya Genç travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attacked Istanbul, and journalists and teachers were imprisoned, he walked the streets of the famous Ottoman neighbourhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who lived among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations.
The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale. Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview, and his own autobiography, Genç takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.
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The Books I Picked & Why
A Journal of the Plague Year
By
Daniel Defoe
Why this book?
Paranoia, hatred of the Other, animosity toward all intellectuals, minorities, and dissidents — these sentiments spread like a disease in Turkey over 2017. In Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year the plague spreads with similar ruthlessness while the eyewitness account provides an anchor for readers. It’s an intense, focused, and yet detached chronicle. Defoe’s book was my template while writing The Lion and the Nightingale.
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The Year of Magical Thinking
By
Joan Didion
Why this book?
An episode in this magisterial book returned to me while writing The Lion and the Nightingale in late 2017. John Gregory Dunne, her husband of thirty-nine years, has died from a heart attack on December 30, 2003, and Joan Didion recalls refusing to give away his shoes, in the sad hope that he might return. The precision of Didion’s language, her analysis of grief, and navigation of uncharted territories after a great loss, inspired me. Sensible people in Turkey also fantasised about a return of their liberties in a year of ceaseless oppression. They had lost things dear to them: human rights, dignity, joy. By remaining muted they hoped to retrieve them. It didn’t work.
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
By
Ottessa Moshfegh
Why this book?
The year is 2000. Our narrator has lost her parents in her senior year to cancer and suicide. All she wants is to sleep. Her apathetic state is familiar to Turkey’s citizens. Throughout 2017, similar sentiments—resentment, cynicism, inaction—defined our psyche. Moshfegh‘s year ends with a terror attack. Ours started with one.
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Darkness at Noon
By
Arthur Koestler
Why this book?
Set during Moscow Show Trials in 1938, this chilling novel by Arthur Koestler chronicles the purging of intellectuals and politicians in the Communist Party. Stalin used these trials to strengthen his one-man role, setting a pattern for future autocrats.
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One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway — And Its Aftermath
By
Åsne Seierstad,
Sarah Death
Why this book?
2011 was the most violent year in Norway’s history. A bomb, detonated in central Oslo, killed eight people; a massacre on the island of Utøya a few hours later killed sixty-nine more. This book tells that day’s horrors by interweaving sociology, history, and psychology, looking at the weeks and months that surrounded the tragedy. One of Us was an inspiration behind the opening chapter of The Lion and the Nightingale where I tried to recreate the movements of the mass murderer during the Reina nightclub attack on January 1, 2017.
