Join Maureen Freely and Ari Banias for an in-person discussion of Maureen’s translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago on May 3rd at 7 pm CST. Dawn is a fiercely lucid examination of voices of protest in Turkey amid political turmoil. 

Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, senior lecturer at Warwick University, and the President of English PEN. Her seventh novel, Sailing through Byzantium, was chosen as one of the best novels of 2014 by The Sunday Times. She has translated or co-translated a number of Turkish memoirs and classics, including The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and five works by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. She also co-translated A Useless Man by Sait Faik Abasıyanık with Alex Dawes. She is widely regarded as the foremost translator of Turkish literature. Sevgi Soysal was the first writer she ever translated.

Ari Banias is the author of two poetry collections, A Symmetry (W. W. Norton, 2021), which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody (W. W. Norton, 2016). His work has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies, and has been published in Triple Canopy, The Nation, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, The Yale Review, Washington Square, and Bæst, among others. Ari currently lives and works in Chicago.

Sevgi Soysal was born in Istanbul in 1936. Her work is inspired by her childhood in Ankara, youth and student movements in Turkey, revolutionary dreams, and experiences of leftist intellectuals in prison and in exile. In 1974, Soysal won the prestigious Orhan Kemal Award for Best Novel for Noontime in Yenişehir, which she wrote while in prison. Dawn was published in 1975, a beautiful thematic companion to her memoirs of prison life, which were originally published in the newspaper Politika and published in a single volume as Yıldırım Area Women’s Ward in 1976. She wrote a brilliant set of endearing and illuminating story collections, novels, and memoirs over the course of her short life. Soysal died at the age of 40 of cancer in 1976. She left behind an incomplete novel, Welcome, Death!