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by Kaya Genç (Author)
Turkey is a land torn between East and West, between its glorious past and a dangerous, unpredictable future. After the violence of an attempted military coup against President Erdogan in 2016, an event which shocked the world, journalist and novelist Kaya Genç travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attack Istanbul, and journalists and teachers are imprisoned, he walks the streets of the famous Ottoman neighbourhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who live among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations.
Featuring new material on the 2023 elections, The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between East and West, between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale. Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview and his own autobiography, Genç takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.Author Biography
Kaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, 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 LA Review of Books as well as a contributing editor at Index on Censorship. He has written a history of Turkish literature for Harvard University Press, and is the author of Under the Shadow (I.B.Tauris, 2017), an account of the Gezi Park uprisings and the coup attempt of December, 2016. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
