Join us for a virtual discussion about our new release – Sevgi Soysal’s stunning 1975 novel Dawn. The book will be presented by the translator Maureen Freely, in conversation with Merve Emre. The event is hosted by Community Bookstore, in partnership with the Third Place Books and the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith. It will take place on November 17th at 6pm EST via Zoom. You can register here.

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.

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers. She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits. She is a contributing writer at the New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. From 2022-23, she will be a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.

Dawn tells a story about a handful of guests at a dinner party in Adana around the time of the 1971 coup in Turkey. A swift kick knocks down the front door and bumbling policemen converge on the guests, carting them off to holding cells, where they’ll be interrogated and tortured throughout the night. Written by a beloved author of Turkey’s left who was herself imprisoned after the coup of 1971, its concerns remain critical for working people around the world. With a fearlessness that allows for total exposure, Sevgi Soysal offers a portrait of the lives that bloom in the cracks of a repressive system, and the ideas that continue to germinate today.