Yasemin Çongar is the co-founder and general director of P24, a nonprofit platform for independent journalism in Istanbul. She is also the founder of K24, a Turkish literary review, and, most recently, the Istanbul Literature House. An editor, essayist, and translator, Çongar is the author of four books in Turkish. Nous allons passer le reste de notre vie dans une cellule de trois mètres sur trois, seuls, avec une heure par jour pour sortir voir la lumière. In a matter of hours I had traveled across five centuries to arrive at the dungeons of the Inquisition. Betts is doing a PhD at Yale in law, so his poems contain a wealth of personal, social and intellectual perspectives. His viewpoint is also informed by working through his own conflicting feelings about the justice system. When he got out of prison, his mother told him that she had been raped whilst waiting for a bus. Today, Betts believes that mass incarceration is a social evil, but he also thinks that the harms of certain crimes get lost if we only talk about justice as an issue in mass incarceration. Betts is not someone you should read if you want easy answers: that’s what makes him one of the most essential voices about questions of crime and punishment. Update: Nov 6, 2019. Ahmet Altan was released from prison today after a retrial, but three of his co-defendants – Fevzi Yazıcı, Yakup Şimşek and Şükrü Tuğrul Özşengül, as do many other writers and journalists.

Having been a dissenting voice for many years, Altan was not surprised at being arrested. Since Erdoğan took power, democracy and freedom of speech in Turkey, already shaky, have become even less certain. Altan was, however, disappointed by the vagueness of his charge – transmitting “subliminal messages” on a television show the night before the coup – and upset by modern Turkey’s vertiginous descent into nightmarish absurdity.

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I found similarities in this book with Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" and actually even Altan sees this as well, mentioning this book in his memoir. I poured myself tea. I put muesli in a bowl and poured milk over it. I sat in an armchair to drink my tea, eat my muesli and wait for the police to complete their search. The book is very moving and I read the first sections with sadness and anger. However, as I read further, my feelings turned into one of disbelief that the author omitted critical parts of his life prior to his imprisonment, that there was not a drop of regret or remorse for his share of what's going on today. It is quite something that the author is painting a picture in which he was a journalist critical of the government and sent to jail for that reason, whereas the truth is he for long years had cosy relationship with the government and was the editor of a newspaper which targeted and wrongly accused many people who in result were thrown to the dungeons of this brutal regime. The reason Ahmet Altan is in prison is not because he's a dissident journalist, but because he is no longer of any use to the "supreme leader".

Schrijver Ahmet Altan is 68 jaar en zal de rest van zijn leven drieëntwintig uur per dag doorbrengen in een cel. Zoals de titel van het boek al zegt: hij zal de wereld nooit meer zien. Ik vind het ontzettend knap dat de auteur zo positief blijft, terwijl hij leeft in gevangenschap. Hij zit immers in een uitzichtloze situatie. I have always been fascinated by the Turkish culture, their language, their food, their tv shows and their Elif Shafak. Like everyone else, I was captivated by what they portrayed and almost forgot that there is always a hidden facet to everything beautiful. You can imprison me but you cannot keep me here. Because, like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls with ease.” During this dark period, Zhang attempted to kill himself multiple times. Even with his girlfriend’s support, it took years for him to accept the hand fate had dealt him and find a new purpose in life, he says. Exactly forty-five years ago, on a morning just like this one, they had raided our house and arrested my father.It is said that the dead do not know that they are dead. According to Islamic mythology, once the corpse is placed in the grave and covered with dirt and the funeral crowd has begun to disperse, the dead also tries to get up and go home, only to realize when he hits his head on the coffin lid that he has died.

Then, with the compassion of a father feeling sorrow for a child, the voice added: ‘He is afraid of the sky.’ One of the ironies about prison literature is that the most ubiquitous prison books are often written by the sorts of people you wouldn’t usually find on the landing. Most people in prison are from the working class and the underclass. Many have a limited ability to write and don’t have the social capital that you often need to publish a book. So we read about the experiences of intellectuals in prison like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nawal El Saadawi, or from upper-class people like Jeffrey Archer, but very rarely get books from people who are inside for shoplifting, drugs, or killing someone whilst they were drunk driving, etc. Dissidence is the Altan family business: Ahmet’s father Çetin, a polemical journalist, novelist, editor and MP, had been apprehended nearly half a century before by an earlier repressive regime. When the police came to get him, Altan senior offered them tea; they refused it. “It’s not a bribe,” he remarked, pleasantly. “You can drink some.” The joke didn’t go down very well. Four and a half decades later, Ahmet repeated it to the policemen who came for him; they were equally unamused. To be making jokes at all in the circumstances reveals an almost inconceivable sangfroid. He knew that there was no chance whatever of a fair trial; the sentence was a foregone conclusion. Thinking that I would die had a calming effect on me. A person who is going to die does not need to fear the things that life presents. Eloquent and profoundly affecting…Altan's account of living with courage and dignity in grossly unjust circumstances is a testament to human endurance, joining the ranks of the greatest prison memoirs." - The Herald (Scotland)Zhang comes from humble origins. He grew up in a poor village outside central Chongqing, a megacity in southwest China. As a child, he often had to act as a guide for his father and uncle, who had both lost their sight to glaucoma. He still recalls the judgmental looks their neighbors gave them as they passed by.

Altan cita de memória Saramago — "There is no consolation, my sad friend, humans are inconsolable creatures" — a partir do livro "Jangada de Pedra" (1986:60) Intertwining gritty detail with lyrical effusion, Altan's narrative is a searing indictment of Turkey's authoritarian regime and an inspiring testament to human resilience." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) It was as if someone inside me, a person whom I could not exactly call ‘I’ but nevertheless spoke with my voice, through my mouth, and was therefore a part of me, said, as he was being transported in a police car to an iron cage, that he only smoked when he was ‘nervous’. When they asked for my name I would say ‘Ahmet Hüsrev Altan’. When they asked where I lived I would give them the number of a cell.

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Taken to court, the disorientation continued. The judges were out of Kafka, but as in Kafka, not savage or brutal, but erratic, bewildering, surreal. He found that he had been arrested not, as originally stated, for sending “subliminal messages” in support of the attempted coup, but for having participated in it. Challenged as to the change of charge, the judge, remarked, airily: “Our prosecutors like using words the meanings of which they don’t know.” Ahmet Atlan's memoir is a message in a bottle, a pearl in a bottle, smuggled out to us from Erdogan's sea of darkness. I Will Never See The World Again is a startling, heartbreaking testament to the author's honesty and resilience, a love letter to his calling, an eye-witness statement from the hell of denunciations and mass arrests that Turkey has become... Read this - it will explain why you ever read anything, why anyone ever writes' AL Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet Who knows where this sentence came from. Nowhere in my mind had I chosen to make such a declaration. It was a sentence that put an unbridgeable distance between itself and reality. It ignored reality, ridiculed it, even as I was being transformed into a pitiful bug who could not even open the door of the car he was in, who had lost his right to decide his own future, whose very name was being changed; a bug entangled in the web of a poisonous spider. I am looking after a parakeet,’ the voice answered. ‘He was born in the prison, then his mama died. I raised him.’