Aysegül Savas – författare

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2024‘An erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love... Asya and Manu could very well be a couple in a novel by Sally Rooney or Caleb Azumah Nelson.' GUARDIAN​'Immaculately observed... I found myself not wanting The Anthropologists to end.' FINANCIAL TIMES‘Savaş’ prose is an X-ray – an acute portrait of the tender frequencies that make a life.’ RAVEN LEILANI__________________________________________________________________________________Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. Removed from the web of family and its obligations, what traditions and rituals should they establish together?As they dream about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days gathering footage from the neighbourhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs, anxious to know how people really live. ‘Forget about daily life,’ chides her grandmother on the phone, ‘no one cares about that.’Meanwhile, life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues – parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up – all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of home-building and modern love, written with Aysegül Savaş’ distinctive elegance, warmth and humour.__________________________________________________________________________________Praise for THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS‘The Anthropologists is about love, youth, and that most profound and elusive of subjects – happiness. Full of delicacy, wisdom and wit, this is another gorgeous work from one of my favourite writers.’ KATIE KITAMURA   ‘Like Walter Benjamin, Ayşegül Savaş uncovers trapdoors to bewilderment everywhere in everyday life; like Henry James, she sees marriage as a mystery, unsoundably deep. The Anthropologists is mesmerising; I felt I read it in a single breath.’ GARTH GREENWELL  ‘Yet another gorgeous, gorgeous book from Aysegül Savaş: she is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows. Savaş knows hope. Savaş knows despair. Savaş knows joy, and malaise, and laughter and curiosity. There are worlds inside of Savaş' prose, and The Anthropologists is both a bright light and a map for how to be. A massively heartening achievement.’ BRYAN WASHINGTON

Acclaimed author of The Anthropologists Aysegül Savaş’s acute and tender first collection explores the distances we keep, and those we try to close, in the age of connectivity.A researcher abroad in Rome eagerly awaits a visit from her long distance lover, only to find he is not the same man she remembers. An expat meets a childhood friend on a layover and is dismayed by her unexpected contentment. A newly pregnant woman considers the taboo of sharing the news too soon, but can't resist when an opportunity comes to patch up a damaged friendship.Long Distance showcases Savas's devastating talent for the short story. Her shrewd encapsulations of contemporary life often centre on characters displaced more by choice than circumstance, characters both determined to install themselves in new lives and preoccupied with the people they've left behind. ‘Don’t be deceived by Savaş’s cool, matter-of-fact tone – beneath it lie layers of wisdom, delicacy and subtlety’ Guardian‘Singular, delightful… The melancholy of these narrators, though tangible, treads only lightly on the text – an effect achieved through the spareness of Savas’s prose style’ TLS‘Rome, Marseille, Istanbul, Paris and small-town Russia are the backdrops for these tender stories’ Daily Mail ‘An exceptionally elegant, intelligent, and original writer’ Sigrid Nunez ‘The rigor of Didion and the tenderness of Sebald’ Catherine Lacey ‘One of my favourite writers’ Katie Kitamura

Acclaimed author of The Anthropologists Aysegül Savaş’s acute and tender first collection explores the distances we keep, and those we try to close, in the age of connectivity.A researcher abroad in Rome eagerly awaits a visit from her long distance lover, only to find he is not the same man she remembers. An expat meets a childhood friend on a layover and is dismayed by her unexpected contentment. A newly pregnant woman considers the taboo of sharing the news too soon, but can't resist when an opportunity comes to patch up a damaged friendship.Long Distance showcases Savas's devastating talent for the short story. Her shrewd encapsulations of contemporary life often centre on characters displaced more by choice than circumstance, characters both determined to install themselves in new lives and preoccupied with the people they've left behind. ‘Don’t be deceived by Savaş’s cool, matter-of-fact tone – beneath it lie layers of wisdom, delicacy and subtlety’ Guardian‘Singular, delightful… The melancholy of these narrators, though tangible, treads only lightly on the text – an effect achieved through the spareness of Savas’s prose style’ TLS‘Rome, Marseille, Istanbul, Paris and small-town Russia are the backdrops for these tender stories’ Daily Mail ‘An exceptionally elegant, intelligent, and original writer’ Sigrid Nunez ‘The rigor of Didion and the tenderness of Sebald’ Catherine Lacey ‘One of my favourite writers’ Katie Kitamura

‘Savaş writes with both sensuality and coolness, as if determined to find a rational explanation for the irrationality of existence...’ New York Times‘I fell in love with this book.’ Katie Kitamura, author of Audition and A SeparationThe mesmerizing debut novel by the author of The Anthropologists set in Paris and Istanbul, about a young Turkish woman grappling with her past and her complicated relationship with a famous British writer.After her mother's death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city.M. is working on a new novel set in Turkey and Nunu tells him about her family, hoping to impress and inspire him. She recounts the idyllic landscapes of her past, mythical family meals, and her elaborate childhood games. As she does so, she also begins to confront her mother's silence and anger, her father's death, and the growing unrest in Istanbul. Their intimacy deepens, so does Nunu's fear of revealing too much to M. and of giving too much of herself and her Istanbul away. Most of all, she fears that she will have to face her own guilt about her mother and the narratives she's told to protect herself from her memories.A wise and unguarded glimpse into a young woman's coming into her own, Walking on the Ceiling is about memory, the pleasure of invention, and those places, real and imagined, we can't escape.

'I loved this book for its depth and perception, for its beauty and eerie rhythms, but most of all for its wonderfully dream-like spell. It's breathtaking' Brandon TaylorA student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.White on White is a sharp exploration of what it means to be truly vulnerable and laid bare.'Deeply humane, quietly devastating, mesmerisingly beautiful' Olivia Sudjic'Marvellous' Lauren Groff'Gentle, mysterious and profound' Marina Abramovic'Enthralling' Observer'An exceptionally elegant, intelligent, and original writer' Sigrid Nunez

'Everywhere in the wilderness I hear the cries of other mothers. I call back to them, asking for help, but sometimes they can’t hear me through their own cries’A forty-day journey of trial and transformation has meaning in many cultures, including in Savaş’s own. In this candid, tender essay, she charts a path through an unknown landscape – the first forty days of motherhood – in search of herself and the words for what has happened to her, following the birth of her baby.

A deeply felt chronicle into the wilderness of the first forty days of new motherhood. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, Aysegul Savas becomes fascinated by the mythology around the first forty days after giving birth, and the invisible beings that are said to surround the mother. 'In Turkish, we speak of extracting the forty days, like a sort of exorcism. My grandmothers assure me that it will all get better after forty days are out.' A friend lends a book that suggests forty days of rest and fortifying broths and avoiding wind and cold. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, forty days are seen as a period of trial and transformation. They are often journeys into the wilderness and 'its vast and unruly territories.' When the baby arrives, Savas charts her own path into the wilderness of new motherhood - a space of contradiction, of chaos and care, mothering and being mothered. 'What is the trial of the postpartum crossing?' writes Savas. 'Where will mother and child emerge once they have left the wild?'