Hakan Günday

Hakan Günday — Biography

Hakan Günday is a novelist and screenwriter regarded as one of the leading names of underground literature in Turkey. Through his anti-heroes he questions social morality and the institutions of marriage and family, and he often writes about sexuality, violence and drugs. His novels have won prizes in France, and he wrote the series Şahsiyet. He lives and works in Istanbul.

He was born in Rhodes, where his diplomat father was posted, and finished primary school in Brussels. After Tevfik Fikret High School in Ankara he studied at Hacettepe University, the Université libre de Bruxelles and Ankara University's Faculty of Political Science, and for a time made his living as a jeweller in Antalya. He published his first novel, Kinyas ve Kayra, in 2000 while still a student; it is regarded as Turkey's first underground novel. Zargana, Piç, Malafa, Azil and Ziyan followed. Malafa was staged by Tiyatro DOT in 2010, and Az (2011) won him the Dünya Kitap award for best Turkish novel of the year.

With Ziyan he won the Franco-Turkish literary prize in 2014, and with Daha, published in French as Encore, the Prix Médicis étranger; Daha was later filmed by Onur Saylak. He returned to the refugee question in Zamir (2021), eight years after Daha, and in 2022 shared the International Hermann Hesse Prize with his translator Sabine Adatepe. As a screenwriter he is best known for Şahsiyet and for Müslüm, on the life of singer Müslüm Gürses (both 2018); he has also published the graphic novel Kana Diz Kana (2020) and the story collection Derz (2023).