Halide Edib Adivar – författare

From the most acclaimed Turkish woman writer of the twentieth century comes a novel of violent political uprisings, opera, adultery, polygamy, modernity, liberty, and exile in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Set in the early twentieth century, the novel follows Fahir, a philosopher, idealist, and reformist who graduates from Oxford University and returns to Istanbul after a voluntary (but possibly compulsory) exile. In the midst of political turmoil and social upheaval, Fahir finds himself embroiled in a love triangle with Macide, a traditional Muslim Turkish woman, and Seviyye, a rebellious Turkish soprano who defies social and religious norms. A bestseller in Turkey in 1910, the novel features the first-ever Turkish soprano protagonist and is interwoven with operatic references and landscapes from turn-of-the-century Istanbul and Cairo.

A prominent novelist, social activist, journalist, and nationalist, Halide Edib Adivar (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. Memoirs is the first book in her two volume English-language autobiography, published in 1926, while she and her second husband Dr. Adnan were in exile in London and Paris having fallen out of favor with Mustafa Kemal's one-party regime. Edib describes her childhood, her confrontation with her first husband's polygyny, her divorce, and her entry into political and literary writing. Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality.