}

Hakan Günday

Hakan Günday (b 1976, Rhodes, Greece) is a Turkish novelist and dramatist. He made his literary debut in 2000 with Kinyas ve Kayra, and has subsequently published a number of novels which have been translated into such languages as Arabic, English and Norwegian.

Günday’s 2013 novel Daha takes the contemporary refugee crisis as its theme and introduces the reader to nine-year-old Gazâ, who is recruited by his own father as a people smuggler. This work won the French Médicis prize for the best translated novel in 2015.

This disturbing new novel by Hakan Gunday, one of Turkey’s leading young writers, is like a visit to a Hieronymus Bosch hell: terrifying scenes of suffering, starvation, sadism, depravity and the agonies associated with combat zones. (...) [A] complex, Dostoyevsky-like inquiry into man’s capacity for evil.
MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES - about Daha

Ambitious, compelling (...) The visceral punch and drive of its prose in many bravura passages (...) evokes Irvine Welsh or William Burroughs more than Oliver Twist.
THE ECONOMIST - about Daha

Hakan Günday

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