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Articles by Maureen Freely
Life Adorned with a Little Death: A Review of Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü
Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Transit Books, 2025 The Turkish writer Tezer Özlü lacks widespread recognition in the Anglosphere, but the tide of her English reception is turning thanks to the efforts of Maureen Freely, the translator of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. In her lifetime of 1943-86, Özlü was part of a moment in modern Turkish literary history in which secular women writers proliferated.
Ben Philipps - Genealogy of Genocide
My Blue Peninsula, Maureen Freely’s fourth novel set in the Istanbul of her youth, follows Dora Giraud from childhood into late middle age as she uncovers and grapples with a viciously complex familial legacy. Dora’s heritage is part-Ottoman, part-Armenian, part-American: she is the descendent of both the perpetrators and the victims of genocide.
Virtual Event: Maureen Freely, Aysegül Savas, and Merve Emre discuss
The Bell Jar meets Good Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey’s most beloved writers. Third Place Books, Community Bookstore, and the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith are pleased to welcome critic Merve Emre, author Aysegül Savas, and translator Maureen Freely for a panel discussion of Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü.
Sevgi Soysal’s Liberation of the Mind
In 1971, the Turkish novelist Sevgi Soysal found herself in prison. The charges? Obscenity, communism, and losing her ID. The first two were beyond dispute: The candor of her fiction, alongside her (complicated) commitment to communism, challenged the country’s conservative mores. But the last charge remains apocryphal. During an argument between friends, she apparently bellowed the word yeter (“enough!”) so loudly that it drew the attention of the police.
Engaging Books Series: Archipelago Books Selections
[Engaging Books is a monthly series featuring new and forthcoming books in Middle East Studies from publishers around the globe. Each installment highlights a trending topic in the MENA publishing world and includes excerpts from the selected volumes.This installment involves a selection from Archipelago Books.
“Her Novels Were Not For Men.” On Suat Derviş, Turkish Novelist
By the time she turned 16, Suat Derviş had witnessed the collapse of an empire, and with it the social order that had given her family its lofty rank. Constantinople, the city of her birth, and for two millennia one of the world’s great capitals, had been ravaged by more than a decade of political upheaval and, finally, defeat in the First World War. Refugees now roamed its streets in the hundreds of thousands.
In the Shadow of the Yali
A Novel by Suat Dervis Translated by Maureen Freely NAMED A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE MILLIONS Set in a changing Istanbul, this rediscovered 1940s classic from a pioneering Turkish author tells the story of a forbidden love and its consequences. Raised by her grandmother in one of the famed yalıs, elegant yet crumbling, that line the Bosphorus, Celile occupies a unique space between the old world of the Ottoman Empire and the new world of the Republic.
The secret of the Hill Cocktail
They were serious romantics, the adults who brought me up. They came to Robert College in the decades after the Second World War not just to teach, but to explore Istanbul, forgotten by the world in those days, and to them a revelation. They took us children with them on their wanderings. Whatever they discovered, they wanted us to see, too. At home on the hill behind the college, they made us just as welcome at their parties.
The Black Book in Fiction Fiction at Strand Books
Includes a New Preface. In this unconventional mystery originally published in 1990, Pamuk fashions a dazzling hall-of-mirrors meditation on identity, memory & reality, elliptically condemning a society that uses informers and secret police to enforce obedience. Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared.
Istanbul Blues | by Suzy Hansen
In the early morning hours of September 4, 1963, a family was asleep in a yal?, or wooden house, near the shore of the Bosphorus. Fog sometimes twists so completely around the waters of Istanbul that from the hillsides of the European quarter the Old City disappears. From a perch on the Asian side it can seem as if there is no Europe at all.
The Only Dissident Novel For Sale in Turkey
Since the failed coup of July 2016, Turkey’s president has been working overtime to silence his enemies and control what his supporters hear, see, and learn.
Madonna in a Fur Coat
Doomed young love never fails to fascinate, which likely helps explain the belated success of MADONNA IN A FUR COAT, the long-forgotten 1943 novel by Turkish writer Sabahattin Ali. That Ali, a prominent critic and intellectual imprisoned for his political writings, was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1948 only adds to the novel’s allure.
Freedom to Write by Maureen Freely
The following was given on April 25 as the inaugural PEN Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial Lecture. In March 1985 Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter made a trip together to Istanbul. At the time, they were perhaps the two most important names in world theater, but unfortunately, it was not a play or a literary event that brought them to Istanbul, but the ruthless limits being set on freedom of expression in Turkey at that time, and the many writers languishing in prison.
Seeing Istanbul Again
In one way or another, I have been translating since the age of eight. This is how old I was when my family moved from Princeton, New Jersey, to the shores of the Bosphorus. After we settled in Istanbul, we spent our summers and large parts of all the other seasons exploring the shores of the Mediterranean. Each time we arrived in a new city, we walked until we got lost.
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