In the last twenty years, however, as more Kurdish writers have successfully navigated Turkey’s fraught literary publishing industry, two of them have secured a mainstream domestic audience for their prison narratives: Burhan Sönmez, with İstanbul İstanbul (2015), and Kemal Varol, with Kara Sis (2021).

As a result, memoirs such as Mehmet Uzun’s Tu (1985) and Leyla Zana’s Writings from Prison (1999) were published outside of Turkey and only much later made available to a Turkish-language audience. More recently, Freely wrote in the introduction to the English-language edition of Dawn (2019), a collection of short stories by Selahattin Demirtaş, an imprisoned human rights lawyer and the former co-chair of Turkey’s second-largest opposition party, that “running alongside Turkey’s grand tradition of writing resistance is a grand tradition of reading it.” Yet, Turkey’s Kurdish writers have far more often encountered censorship of their prison narratives due to their choice of language and content considered by prison authorities or publishers to be overly provocative. In his 2019 Washington Post article, “From Turkey’s bursting prisons, literature breaks out”, Kareem Fahim writes, “As surely as dissidents have been locked up throughout Turkey’s turbulent modern history, their words - poems, memoirs, fiction and even screenplays - have managed to break out.” But even before the government’s “frenetic” crackdown put thousands of people behind bars, setting off “a sullen publishing boom”, Maureen Freely had examined the prison imaginary in Turkish literature, likening Orhan Pamuk and Elif Şafak’s brushes with the Turkish law to the prison experiences of their left-wing predecessors, Nâzım Hikmet and Orhan Kemal.

Writings from Prison by Leyla Zana