Turkish Novelist to Read at Alma College
Novelist, critic and essayist Nedim Gürsel, one of Turkey's most
important writers, will read from his short fiction and discuss his
career in Istanbul and Paris during a presentation at 4 p.m. Tuesday,
March 13 in the Alma College Library.
The reading, sponsored by Alma’s Center for Responsible Leadership, is
free and open to the public. Yavuz Demir, visiting Fulbright scholar
from Turkey, helped arrange Gürsel’s visit to Alma.
Gürsel is the author of more 30 books, including novels, essays, short
stories, literary criticism and travel writing. He received his
doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne in 1979.
Following some censorship by Turkish authorities in the early 1980s,
Gürsel spent much of the following two decades in Paris in “self exile”
and has published works in both French and Turkish. He now divides his
time between Paris and Istanbul.
He received Turkey's highest literature prize, the Prize of the Turkish Language Academy, in 1976 for his volume of stories A Summer Without End. In 1986, he received the Ipekci Prize promoting Turkish-Greek cultural understanding for The First Woman. In the same year he received the Prix de la Liberté of the French PEN club.
He also received the Radio France Internationale Prize for the best
novel of 1990, and in 2003 he won the France-Turkey Prize for his
lifetime achievements. In 2004 he received the Fernand Rouillon
Literary Prize from the Franco-Turkish Committee at the Turkish Tourism
Office in Paris. In the same year he was named a Chevalier des Arts et
Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
His reading will feature the story The Graveyard of Unwritten Books, or Well of Locks,
which imagines a vault in Paris that holds all the books banned by
authorities and books that never made it to print because of external
and self-censorship.
Posted: Mon, March 5th, 2007 at 2:34PM
