Burhan Sönmez
From 9 March to 23 March 2022

Burhan Sönmez was born in Turkey in 1965 and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer for a number of years in Istanbul specialized in human rights before moving to Britain as a political exile. He has written for a number of publications, including The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and La Repubblica. He has translated William Blake’s poems into Turkish. He is the author of four novels in Turkish, which have been translated into forty languages, including, in English, Sins and Innocents (Garnet Publishing, 2014), Istanbul Istanbul (OR Books, 2016), and Labyrinth (Other Press, 2019). He received the Disturbing the Peace Award from the Vaclav Havel Library and the EBRD Literature Prize. He is president of PEN International.