Every Fire You Tend - Paperback

by Sema Kaygusuz (Author), Nicholas Glastonbury (Translator)

Winner, 2019 TA First Translation Prize Winner, English PEN Translates Award 'You traced the shape of shame with your body, concealing that feeling as it pulled you into its centre. You were seeking a language for yourself, a language inherited from no one and akin to no one else's, a language of figs...' In 1938, in the remote Dersim region of Eastern Anatolia, the Turkish Republic launched an operation to erase an entire community of Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds. Inspired by those brutal events, and the survival of Kaygusuz's own grandmother, this densely lyrical and allusive novel grapples with the various inheritances of genocide, gendered violence and historical memory as they reverberate across time and place from within the unnamed protagonist's home in contemporary Istanbul. Kaygusuz imagines a narrative anchored by the weight of anguish and silence, fuelled by mysticism, wisdom and beauty. This is a powerful exploration of a still-taboo subject, deeply significant to the fault lines of modern-day Turkey.

Author Biography

Sema Kaygusuz (born 1972) is one of Turkey's leading female writers. She has published five collections of short stories, three novels, a collection of nonfiction essays, and a play, which have won a number of awards in Turkey and Europe and have been translated into English, French, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. Her short story collection The Well of Trapped Words was published in an English translation by Maureen Freely (Comma Press, 2015). Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator of Turkish literature. He is also a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya.