Ahmet Altan, one of today’s most important Turkish writers and journalists, was arrested in September 2016. An advocate for Kurdish and Armenian minorities and a central figure in the Turkish cultural world (Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk has written about his arrest and signed an open letter calling for his release), he is the author of five successful novels. The first, published when he was twenty-seven years old, won the Grand Prix from the Akademi Publishing House. In 2009 he received the prestigious Prize for the Freedom and Future of the Media from the Media Foundation of Sparkasse Leipzig, and in 2011 he received the International Hrant Dink Award. The international bestseller Endgame was his English-language debut.
Yelda Türedi was born in Mersin in 1970 and studied chemical engineering at Boğaziçi University. Brendan Freely was born in Princeton in 1959 and studied psychology at Yale University. They have been working as freelance literary translators since 2004. Among the books they have translated are, Two Girls by Perihan Mağden, The Gaze by Elif Şafak, The Eunuch of Constantinople, Leyla’s House and Serenade by Zülfü Livaneli, Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan, While Climbing Above the Clouds by Cem Kozlu, After Me Continuity by Akın Öngör and In the Shadow of My Eyelashes by Şebnem İşigüzel.