Ingenious Turkish writer Leylâ Erbil’s diaries to be published one year after death

ISTANBUL

Leylâ Erbil passed away at the age of 82 on July 18 last year.

The İş Bankası Publishing House is preparing to mark the first anniversary of Turkish writer Leylâ Erbil’s death by publishing a compilation of her diaries.

Erbil, who was recognized as one of Turkey’s most genuinely talented authors, passed away at the age of 82 on July 18 last year due to heart failure, after years of suffering from leukemia. “I’m still alive. Surprisingly,” Erbil wrote in one diary entry in 2011.

Erbil was the first Turkish female writer to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, and often spoke in interviews about “breaking the mold of the Turkish language” to invent a new syntax when the story demanded it. In many of her works, she took a strange pleasure in casting characters through agonizing processes of self-questioning and soul searching.

The intimate, to-be-published diaries reflect Erbil’s inner thoughts about her works, showing the high standards that she demanded of herself.