Kaya Genc is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul whose writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, Salon, Guernica Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Millions, The White Review and TIME Magazine, among others. His first novel, L Avventura was published in 2008. Kaya has a PhD in English literature and is the Istanbul correspondent of The Believer and The LA Review of Books as well as a contributing editor at Index on Censorship. His article for The LA Review of Books Surviving the Black Sea was selected as one of best non-fiction pieces of 2014 by The Atlantic. Currently writing a history of Turkish literature for Harvard University Press, and due to publish his first English novel later next year, he is one of Turkey s most hotly-anticipated young writers.
'Kaya Genc's writing is as evocative as it is charming' - Elif Shafak, New Yorker Staff Writer and author of The Architect's Apprentice and Honour, 'Kaya Genc is one of the most interesting Turkish writers to have emerged in recent years. In his essays as well as his fiction, he converses across borders, while forging his own distinct voice and perspective and challenging dominant narratives.'- Maureen Freely, President of PEN, author of The Enlightenment and translator of Orhan Pamuk, I finished reading Under the Shadow a while ago, but haven't stopped thinking about it. It's such an incisive, passionate, moving book, the best thing I've read in quite some time. For whatever it's worth I'm reasonably well informed about world events but Under the Shadow increased my knowledge of Turkey, from its politics to its people, by approximately ten fold. We need books like it in order to get a fuller picture, certainly fuller than the news can provide, of life and crisis, of how life and crisis co-exist, in places where we do not live ourselves. -Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hours, `In Under the Shadow, Turkish journalist Kaya Genc takes a kaleidoscopic view of Turkey's current rolling state of unrest and of a divided society trying to reconcile its evolving identity in the twenty-first century.' - Selected by Signature Magazine (Penguin Random House) in `After the Ottoman Empire: The Best Turkey Books to Read Now'