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Contributor

Sevgi Soysal

Contributor

Sevgi Soysal

Sevgi Soysal was born in Istanbul in 1936. Her work is inspired by her childhood in Ankara, youth and student movements in Turkey, revolutionary dreams, and experiences of leftist intellectuals in prison and in exile. In 1974, Soysal won the prestigious Orhan Kemal Award for Best Novel for Noontime in Yenişehir, which she wrote while in prison. Dawn was published in 1975, a beautiful thematic companion to her memoirs of prison life, which were originally published in the newspaper Politika and published in a single volume as Yıldırım Area Women’s Ward in 1976. She wrote a brilliant set of endearing and illuminating story collections, novels, and memoirs over the course of her short life. Soysal died of cancer at the age of forty in 1976. She left behind an incomplete novel, Welcome, Death!

Articles by Sevgi Soysal

A dark room where only a small sliver of window lets in any light
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
A Friendly Face
By Sevgi Soysal
Just what she needed. An outing with a man just released from prison.
Translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely
An illustration of a girl in a red and white tutu standing on the back of a white horse in front...
Popular Graphic Arts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Tante Rosa, Would-be Horse Acrobat
By Sevgi Soysal
Rosa would no longer be falling off of horses. Instead, she would bag the manure of the circus animals and sell it to villagers.
Translated from Turkish by Amy Spangler