The prominent Turkish novelist Ahmet Altan has written an essay from his prison cell on the eve of his trial, describing his detention in a high-security jail where he is forbidden to send “even a two-line letter to my loved ones”.



Altan, the author of 10 acclaimed novels that have been translated around the world, as well as essays and journalism, was arrested last September following the attempted coup in Turkey in July 2016. Charges against him include “giving subliminal messages in favour of a coup on television”, “membership of a terrorist organisation” and “attempting to overthrow the government”. Altan faces a possible life sentence if he is found guilty of the charges.

One year after the failed coup in Turkey, the crackdown continues Read more

He has been detained since September 2016, apart from a brief release on probation when he told the press: “This country is ours, we are not afraid. We’ll always defend law and democracy,” before being imprisoned again less than 24 hours later. A host of writers, including Philip Pullman, Arundhati Roy, JM Coetzee and AS Byatt have called for his release, putting their names to a letter in which they say his “crime is not supporting a coup but the effectiveness of his criticism of the current government”.

With his trial set to begin on Tuesday, Altan detailed his experience in prison in an essay called The Writer’s Paradox, translated by Yasemin Çongar and published on Monday by the Society of Authors and English PEN. In it, Altan reveals he is “being held in a high-security prison in the middle of the wilds”, in a cell where he is given his meals through a hole in the door, and where “even the top of the small, stone-paved courtyard where I pace up and down is covered with steel cages”. He is not allowed to see anyone but his lawyers and his children, he writes, and is “forbidden from sending even a two-line letter to my loved ones”.

“Whenever I have to go to the hospital they pull handcuffs out of a cluster of ironwork and put them around my wrists,” he writes. “Each time they take me out of my cell, orders such as ‘raise your arms, take off your shoes’ hit me in the face.”

But Altan also writes of how this is “not the whole truth”, because the books he is reading and stories he is imagining are helping him to survive his incarceration. “When I wake up with the whisper of the snow piling up inside the window bars in winter, I start the day in that dacha with a front window where Doctor Zhivago took refuge. Until now, I have never woken up in prison – not once,” he writes. “I talk all day with people who are seen and heard by no one, people who don’t exist and won’t exist until the day I mention them … As I don’t want to put them on paper in prison, I inscribe all of this into the crannies of my mind with the dark ink of memory.”

Because he is a writer, Altan says, “they may have the power to imprison me but no one has the power to keep me in prison”, because “wherever you lock me up I will travel the world with the wings of my endless mind … Like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through walls with ease.”

The Society of Authors has been working with English PEN and the Publishers Association on the “Speak Out” partnership to free Altan and his brother Mehmet Altan, an economist and journalist who is also detained. The writers’ organisations say that the conditions of Altan’s detention are “a cause of particular concern”, because he and his brother “are reported to have very limited access to their lawyers and families, and no access to prison facilities such as the library and sports hall”. They are also banned from sending or receiving any written communications – making the publication of his essay “no mean feat”.

Writers backing the campaign include Chocolat author Joanne Harris, who said on Monday: “Writers exist to question, to challenge, sometimes even to ridicule – the status quo. For a government to imprison a writer for doing this is to attack, not only freedom of speech, but freedom of the imagination. It is a backward, oppressive and ultimately futile gesture that can only lead to greater and more damaging social unrest. I condemn it entirely, and hope that Ahmet Altan is freed as soon as possible.”