London Review Bookshop to host Turkish events season

The London Review Bookshop is to host a “mini Turkish season” in response to the recent events that have occurred in Turkey.

Following an attempted coup last month, the country has experienced unrest, with global publishing chiefs signing a petition last week condemning the closure of 29 Turkish presses. The presses were shut down by the Turkish government under state of emergency regulations in reaction to the failed coup.

The LRB's Turkish season will include a discussion on the ‘State of Turkey’, the showing of two contemporary Turkish films "Mustang" and "Innocence of Memories", and a special display of Turkish literature in the bookshop.

On 15th September, two of Turkey’s "most prominent" young writers will be at the shop to talk about Turkey's past, present and future. Ece Temelkuran’s Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy is published by Zed Books, and Kaya Genç’s Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey will be published by I.B. Tauris on 6th October. Daniel Trilling, editor of the New Humanist and author of Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right (Verso), will chair the event.

The next day, 16th September at 7pm, will see the LRB will host a film screening of "Mustang" in conjunction with Curzon Home Cinema. "Mustang" is both a "rousing tale of spirited youth" and a "powerful, moving and timely work of engaging social cinema", the bookshop said. The film will be introduced by Heather McIntosh, programming and acquisitions executive for Curzon Home Cinema.

On Friday 23rd September, the shop will host a screening of "Innocence of Memories", which will be introduced by the director, Grant Gee. Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has made his second major foray into writing for cinema with "Innocence of Memories".  His collaboration with Gee, inspired by Pamuk’s 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence (Faber) is "neither strictly factual nor complete fiction" and is described as "a physical and psychological journey through Istanbul, mixing imagined narratives with real-world observation, and a fictional narrator’s recollections with self-reflexive commentary".

London Review Bookshop deputy manager David Lea said: "For several years, the London Review of Books has been reporting from the front-line of Turkish politics and in the bookshop we’ve been developing our range of Turkish literature. We wished to respond to the tumultuous events of recent weeks with a special focus on that unique country".