On Thursday, June 25, please join us at The Mosaic Rooms in London for the UK launch of A Useless Man: Selected Stories, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe. The evening will feature a conversation between co-translator Maureen Freeley and award-winning cultural journalist Maya Jaggi.

Sait Faik Abasıyanık was born in Adapazarı in 1906 and died in Istanbul in 1954. In twelve books of short stories, two novels, and a book of poetry, Sait Faik’s prose celebrates the natural world and renders in vivid detail the struggles of his characters: ancient coffeehouse proprietors and priests, dream-addled fishermen and poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. Many stories are loosely autobiographically and deal with Sait Faik’s frustration with social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the slow yet steady ethnic cleansing of his city. Seemingly in keeping with the restrictions that the new Republic placed on language and culture, the fluid, limpid surfaces of these tales craftily veil the deeper truths lying in their subversive undercurrents. Sait Faik is greatly revered to this day, lending his name to Turkey’s most prestigious short story award. Nearly every Turk knows by heart a line or a story by Sait Faik.

The event is free and open to the public!

Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, senior lecturer at Warwick University, and the President of English PEN. Translator of five books by Orhan Pamuk, Fethiye Cetin’s My Grandmother, and – with Alexander Dawe – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute, she is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and The Sunday Times for two decades. Her novels include Sailing through Byzantium, Enlightenment, Angry in Piraeus, and The Other Rebecca.

Maya Jaggi has been a profile-writer and critic for Guardian Review since 2000, and is an award-winning cultural journalist. She has reported on arts and culture from five continents, and is an influential voice on world literature. Some of her interviews appear in the books Lives and Works (2002) and Writing Across Worlds (2004).