PALEWELL PRESS

İlhan is a Kurdish poet living in Turkey. In 1994, while he was studying geography at Istanbul University, he was arrested. It was a time when many Kurdish students and activists were arbitrarily detained. After 19 days of persistent torture he confessed to having lit a fire above Istanbul in the name of the separatist PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). He was found not guilty of this fabricated crime but was found to have engaged in separatist activities on behalf of the outlawed PKK. For this he was sentenced to life in prison, a total of 36 years. By the autumn of 2024, he had been in prison for 30 years.

During his incarceration, he has had nine collections published, mostly lyrical nature poetry drawing on his childhood memories of growing up in a mountain village above Karlıova, near the south-eastern city of Bingöl, Turkey.

In 2007 he won the Sennur Sezer Prize for Poetry and in 2021 the Metin Altıok Prize. In addition to his poetry, he has written a best-selling autobiography and a prize-winning play about his life in prison.

In 2020 PEN Norway began to campaign for İlhan. This began with the translation of his first selected works in English, published by Smokestack Books in 2021 as Separated from the Sun. PEN Norway publicised İlhan’s case and began to write to him and share his poetry. İlhan is now an honorary member of several PEN centres, spanning the world: Norway, Wales, Ireland, Austria, Sydney and San Miguel, Mexico.

In 2021 İlhan won the Norwegian Authors Union Freedom of Expression Prize and in 2024 his poetry was published in Norwegian by Gyldendal. In 2022 an excerpt from İlhan’s poem ‘What I Know of the Sea’ was displayed on the London Underground Elizabeth Line trains as part of Poems on the Underground.

In November 2024, Palewell Press published Words That Walk Through Walls, an anthology of poems written to İlhan by poets around the world and his poems in reply to those poets. Two days before the anthology was due to launch, the Turkish government announced İlhan was to be released.