Kaya Genç on Muck Rack

Kaya Genç

Turkey
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Kaya Genç’s Biography

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Kaya Genç is the author of three books from Bloomsbury Publishing: The Lion and the Nightingale (2019), Under the Shadow (2016) and An Istanbul Anthology (2015). The Economist called Under the Shadow a ‘refreshingly balanced’ book whose author ‘has announced himself as a voice to be listened to’; Publishers Weekly said it ‘represents both investigative and literary journalism at their finest’. The Los Angeles Review of Books described An Istanbul Anthology as ‘a compellingly real picture of the…

Kaya Genç’s Journalist Portfolio

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Opinion | When All Else Fails, Blame the Dogs

Opinion | When All Else Fails, Blame the Dogs

Turkey's four million stray dogs are inseparable from the idea of the country itself. But maybe not for much …

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Ruffians, Gamblers, Thieves, Outcasts | Kaya Genç

Ruffians, Gamblers, Thieves, Outcasts | Kaya Genç

In 2019 the Internet Archive gave me and other Istanbul enthusiasts a great gift: one of its users uploaded a…

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Cries from the Rubble | Kaya Genç

Cries from the Rubble | Kaya Genç

February 6, 2023 The first moment, when information is scarce, is the most uncanny. My aunt, hit by a biblica…

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All That Really Happens Happens to Me: On Annie Ernaux's "Getting Lost"

All That Really Happens Happens to Me: On Annie Ernaux's "Getting Lost"

HOW TO DESCRIBE Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel literature laureate? Novelist, diarist, feminist. Excruciating c…

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Walled future - Literary criticism - TLS

Walled future - Literary criticism - TLS

Dispatches from the world's last divided capital

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As the Syrian refugee crisis returns, the EU appears heartless

As the Syrian refugee crisis returns, the EU appears heartless

Europe's most serious humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, long in the making but recently in hiding, has…

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Articles

Being Powerless but Ethical in Erdoğan’s New Turkey: İlker Çatak’s “Yellow Letters”

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By Kaya Genç
| Notebook Verified
The director of the Golden Bear winner and the Oscar-nominated "The Teachers' Lounge" vividly captures moral dilemmas and life decisions. Yellow Letters (İlker Çatak, 2026). İlker Çatak likes to follow his characters as they make tough choices about how to live their lives. We mostly enter his ethical tales in medias res.
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Semiha Berksoy

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By Kaya Genç
| Artforum Verified
Semiha Berksoy, Annem ve Ben ve Kardeşim (My Mother and I and My Brother), 1982, oil on hardboard, 39 1⁄4 × 27 1⁄2″. Semiha Berksoy (1910–2004) was a renowned Wagnerian soprano as well as an expressionist painter. With a career spanning eight decades, her versatile practice would pose a challenge to any curator. Istanbul Modern’s Berksoy retrospective, “Tüm Renklerin Aryası” (Aria of All Colors), overcame that difficulty.
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By Kaya Genç
| The Point Verified
When I set out to become a novelist in Turkey in the early 2000s, Leylâ Erbil had yet to publish what is perhaps her most accomplished work, What Remains (2011), an experimental bildungsroman written in verse about a woman obsessed with Istanbul’s stones, and published in an English translation last fall. Back then my favorite novels were Flaubert’s Parrot, The Name of the Rose and My Name is Red—the fruits of monkish devotion to historical scholarship transmuted into postmodern fiction.
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