Ahmet Altan
Ahmet Altan is one of Turkey’s most significant authors and journalists. His first novel, Four Seasons of Autumn, published when he was 27, won the Grand Award of the Akademi Publishing House. His second, Trace on the Water, was banned for obscenity. Dangerous Tales, 1996, became a bestseller and sold more than 200,000 copies. His novels have been translated into many languages.
In 2016, Ahmet and his brother Mehmet were arrested as part of a wave of arrests of journalists and writers following the coup attempt in Turkey. In 2018, they were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for their alleged involvement in the coup. The verdict has been widely condemned by human rights groups and journalists worldwide.
Alexander Dawe was born in New York and now lives and works in Istanbul. He received a PEN translation fund to translate the collected short stories of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. He worked with Maureen Freely on a new translation of Tanpinar’s novel The Time Regulation Institute (published by Penguin in the US).
Endgame
A dark, seductive and existential page-turner from one of Turkey’s bestselling and most significant writers
Ahmet Altan has been sentenced to life in prison
Journalist and author Ahmet Altan has been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Following the coup attempt of 2016, the Turkish government under President Erdogan instated a state of emergency and began a series of purges that have seen more than 150,000 people fired, detained or arrested. Ahmet was just one of the journalists and writers that have been tried – one of the charges against him was that he had appeared on television to share subliminal messages in support of the coup.
While he was awaiting trial he wrote the essay ‘The Writer’s Paradox’ – now he’s written another essay in the New York Times about his verdict and the cruel absurdity of the situation he is facing. It begins:
“They sit on a bench that is two meters high. They wear black robes with red collars. In a few hours they will decide my destiny. I look at them. They have loosened their ties out of boredom.”
