Marking the 130th anniversary of the start of the Hamidian Massacres in Sebastia, academic and poet Dr Tamara Wilson, together with authors Andrew Finkel (The Adventure of the Second Wife: The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Sultan) and Maureen Freely (My Blue Peninsula), will join us for an inspiring evening of readings and conversation. Between 1894 and 1896, widespread massacres of Armenians and other Christian communities took place across the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, leaving hundreds of thousands dead or displaced. The violence profoundly reshaped communities across the empire and beyond, with its legacies carried through displacement, diaspora, and intergenerational memory. Through prose and verse, the writers explore how literature can open a path into difficult histories and trace their reverberations across generations. Following readings from their work, they will discuss the challenges and possibilities of narrativising the past, specifically, how do fiction and poetry engage with history, memory, displacement, and silence, and how literary imagination can bring the past into dialogue with the present?
Meet the Speakers
Tamara Wilson is an award-winning poet, academic and the chair of Exiled Writers Ink. As the granddaughter of Armenian and Pontic Greek survivors, she worked with diverse migrant and refugee groups both as an Esol lecturer and charity worker. A devout defender of women and minority rights, she collaborated with several NGOs, charities, community centres, and research institutions against the employment of hate speech and discriminatory discourses as a performance of patriotism.
Her interdisciplinary doctoral research presents fresh perspectives on a number of fields including but not limited to: The role of patriarchal ideology on the construction of national identity and official history discourses; Politics & ethics of representation: A comparative analysis of of the survived and the survivor figure in cultural and official history texts (Armenian and Turkish); The limitations of Postmemory and Trauma theories in the investigation of modern-day Turkey’s indigenous populations.
Currently, as part of her research fellowship at the University of Roehampton, Tamara is working on the hierarchies of belonging in post-Ottoman states via a Fanonian analysis of minoritised identities, social death, and the afterlives of imperial governance.
Andrew Finkel has reported from Turkey for many years for international media including The Times, The Economist, TIME, CNN and the New York Times. He is a contributing editor and restaurant critic for Cornucopia Magazine. His writing and commentary have appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Observer, The Financial Times, The Art Newspaper, The Spectator, Unherd `and on the BBC. Working in the Turkish-language press — in newsrooms, as a columnist and on television — led Finkel to co-found Platform24 (P24), an Istanbul-based NGO supporting independent journalism and freedom of expression. He is the author of Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press). The Adventure of the Second Wife is his debut novel.
Maureen Freely is a writer with eight novels to her name and many other strings to her bow. Well known as a translator of the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, she has also brought into English numerous twentieth century classics and works by Turkey’s rising stars. Her translation of Tezer Özlü's Cold Nights of Childhood won the 2024 NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. For many years she worked as a journalist in London, writing about literature, social justice, and human rights. As Chair of the Translators Association and more recently as President and Chair of English PEN and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she has campaigned for writers and freedom of expression internationally. She teaches at the University of Warwick.