Day of the Imprisoned Writer – İlhan Sami Çomak

In Partnership with Irish PEN / PEN na hÉireann

This year, to mark the Day of the Imprisoned Writer, Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann is proud to dedicate our Dublin Book Festival event to our first Honorary Member, Kurdish poet İlhan Sami Çomak, one of Turkey’s longest-serving political prisoners. Joining us will be: Paula Meehan, poet; Caroline Stockford, PEN Norway, İlhan’s friend and translator; Ipek Ozel, İlhan’s McKenzie Friend; Iggy McGovern, poet and Board member of Irish PEN, and Burhan Sönmez, President of PEN International. With artwork by Gianluca Costantini @channeldraw on display. 

Irish PEN/PEN na hEireann gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Dublin UNESCO City of Literature

© Paula T Nolan

Paula Meehan was born and raised in Dublin’s north inner city. Her award-winning poetry has garnered widespread popular and critical acclaim. She has been translated into many languages; recently
Japanese & Dutch with collections forthcoming in Spanish, Polish, Greek. Her poetry has been scored for choirs, for solo voice, has been made into songs by artists from divers traditions — the folk, including the legendary Christy Moore, and the avant garde; has been made into wee films; has been danced; has been
inflicted on the youth of the country in school & university. Has been 8/1 to come up on the Leaving Cert. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013–2016 and Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, her public lectures from the Chair, are published by UCD Press. Recent publications are As If By Magic: Selected Poems, (2020) and The Solace of Artemis (2023) which received the Pigott Prize for Poetry,  2024. They are published by Dedalus Press, Dublin.

Caroline Stockford is a poet and translator of Turkish literature. She works as Turkey Adviser for PEN Norway and has led the campaign for Ilhan since 2019. She and other translators produced his selected works in English, Separated from the Sun, in 2021 (available from Smokestack
books) and an anthology of world poets writing for Ilhan is on the way.

Ipek Ozel is an academic at the faculty of law, with a focus on human rights, law and prison studies. Lecturing for the last 27 years. Advocating for students in prisons for the last 15 years.  Ipek has served as a McKenzie Friend to 8 students who were long term prisoners and has followed up on many trials of students charged with political crimes. She has been one of Ilhan Sami’s staunchest supporters and friends.

Iggy McGovern was born in 1948 in Coleraine; since 1979 he has resided in Dublin, where he lectured in Physics at Trinity College, retiring in 2013. He has published three collections of poetry with Dedalus Press: The King of Suburbia (2005), Safe House (2010) and The Eyes of Isaac Newton (2017). Other publications include A Mystic Dream of 4 (2013) and Making Waves (2019), both with Quaternia Press.
Awards include The Hennessy Award for Poetry and The Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry.

©Roberto Gandola

Burhan Sönmez is the author of six novels. He is president of PEN International and a Senior Member of Hughes Hall College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His novels have been translated into forty-eight languages and received international prizes, including the EBRD Literature Prize and Vaclav Havel Library Award. He was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before going to Britain for political reasons and living there in exile for several years. He has been on the judging panel of several events, including Inge Feltrinelli Prize and
Geneva International Film Festival and written for press such as La Repubblica, Der Spiegel and The Guardian. He has translated the poetry book of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake into Turkish. Having written five novels in Turkish, he began to write in his mother tongue, Kurdish, with his last novel Lovers of Franz K. He lives between Cambridge and Istanbul.