Maureen Freely and Ari Banias celebrate DAWNWednesday May 3 2023 7:00pm – 8:00pm

We’re excited to welcome translator Maureen Freely and poet Ari Banias to the store for a reading and conversation in celebration of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn. In Dawn, translated into English for the first time by Maureen Freely, legendary Turkish feminist Sevgi Soysal brings together dark humor, witty observations, and trenchant criticism of social injustice, militarism, and gender inequality.

As night falls in Adana, köftes and cups of cloudy raki are passed to the dinner guests in the home of Ali – a former laborer who gives tight bear hugs, speaks with a southeastern lilt, and radiates the spirit of a child. Among the guests are a journalist named Oya, who has recently been released from prison and is living in exile on charges of leftist sympathizing, and her new acquaintance, Mustafa. A swift kick knocks down the front door and bumbling policemen converge on the guests, carting them off to holding cells, where they’ll be interrogated and tortured throughout the night.

Fear spools into the anxious, claustrophobic thoughts of a return to prison, just after tasting freedom. Bristling snatches of Oya’s time in prison rush back – the wild curses and wilder laughter of inmates, their vicious quarrels and rapturous belly-dancing, or the quiet boon of a cup of tea. Her former inmates created fury and joy out of nothing. Their brimming resilience wills Oya to fight through the night and is fused with every word of this blazing, lucid novel.

Ari Banias is the author of two poetry collections, A Symmetry (W. W. Norton, 2021), which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody (W. W. Norton, 2016). His work has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies, and has been published in Triple Canopy, The Nation, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, The Yale Review, Washington Square, and Bæst, among others. Ari currently lives and works in Chicago.

Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, senior lecturer at Warwick University, and the President of English PEN. Her seventh novel, Sailing through Byzantium, was chosen as one of the best novels of 2014 by The Sunday Times. She has translated or co-translated a number of Turkish memoirs and classics, including The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and five works by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. She also co-translated A Useless Man by Sait Faik Abasıyanık with Alex Dawes. She is widely regarded as the foremost translator of Turkish literature. Sevgi Soysal was the first writer she ever translated.

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