Creative writers to have center in İzmir

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

The International Creative Writers’s Center will be established on a 8,000 square meter area in the Seferihisar district, a popular destination in the Aegean region.

İzmir’s Seferihisar district is set to become the site of an International Creative Writers’ Center at the ancient city of Teos, which was known as the city of artists in ancient times, daily Hürriyet reported.
The center will be the first and only international education center where writers will be trained for TV series, novel and ad writing.

The goal of the project is to create a center in the field of text and script writing, an industry that is worth $2 million worldwide. World-renowned writers and professors will give classes at the center, which will also host a writer’s house for famous writers to write books.

The center will be established on the Akkum beach of Seferihisar after a signing ceremony to be held next month. Seferihisar Municipality is providing full support to the project and has allocated 8,000 square meters of land on the beach for the center.

Although leading world universities have opened creative writing departments, the planned center will be the first one to be used by universities in concert, said Yavuz Demir, the head of Samsun’s Ondokuz Mayıs University’s Faculty of Literature and the mastermind behind the project.

“In this sense, this center will be the first of its kind. Its name will be Teos International Creative Writers’ Center. The education in the center will turn into a certified system in the next few years,” Demir said.

Ondokuz Mayıs, Oxford and the United States’ Ferris State universities are all collaborating on the project, Demir said, but added that Stanford and New York universities might also join the project in the future.

Postgraduate and doctoral degrees will be offered at the center, along with conferences, workshops, seminars and summer schools thanks to collaboration between the “dream sector and universities,” according to organizers.

Seferihisar Mayor Tunç Soyer told Hürriyet that the project was expected to make Turkey and Seferihisar a center of attraction in the field of literature. The mayor said an actors’ union was formed for the first time in history in the same region. “This project is suitable for the history of Seferihisar. We expect writers from all around the world to the center.”