A Language of Figs | Sema Kaygusuz | Granta

A Language of Figs

Sema Kaygusuz

Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury

Sema Kaygusuz on the inheritances of genocide and historical memory, and what her own grandmother, a survivor of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey, taught her about life and language.

Sema Kaygusuz

Sema Kaygusuz is one of Turkey’s leading female writers, and the author of Every Fire You Tend. She has published five collections of short stories, three novels, a collection of nonfiction essays, and a play, which have won a number of awards in Turkey and Europe and have been translated into English, French, German, Norwegian and Swedish. Her short story collection The Well of Trapped Words was published in an English translation by Maureen Freely.

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Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury

Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator of Turkish literature. He is also a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya. He is the translator of Every Fire You Tend.

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