May 24th
7pm
"A searing autobiographical novel about a single night in prison suggests how broken spirits can be mended, and dreams rebuilt through imagination and human kindness
“Like Pamuk’s Snow, Dawn is the Turkish tragedy writ small. In contrast to Snow, it places gender at its heart.” --Maureen Freely
In Dawn, translated into English for the first time, legendary Turkish feminist Sevgi Soysal brings together dark humor, witty observations, and trenchant criticism of social injustice, militarism, and gender inequality.
As night falls in Adana, köftes and cups of cloudy raki are passed to the dinner guests in the home of Ali – a former laborer who gives tight bear hugs, speaks with a southeastern lilt, and radiates the spirit of a child. Among the guests are a journalist named Oya, who has recently been released from prison and is living in exile on charges of leftist sympathizing, and her new acquaintance, Mustafa. 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.
Fear spools into the anxious, claustrophobic thoughts of a return to prison, just after tasting freedom. Bristling snatches of Oya’s time in prison rush back – the wild curses and wilder laughter of inmates, their vicious quarrels and rapturous belly-dancing, or the quiet boon of a cup of tea. Her former inmates created fury and joy out of nothing. Their brimming resilience wills Oya to fight through the night and is fused with every word of this blazing, lucid novel.
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.
Zain Khalid’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, The Believer, Astra Magazine, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. His debut novel, BROTHER ALIVE (Grove Atlantic), is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre and was named a best book of 2022 by Library Journal and other outlets. He is also the fiction editor at The Drift.
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