About this Event
Acclaimed journalist and human rights defender Nurcan Baysal offers a powerful and deeply personal account of what it means to be Kurdish in Turkey. She chronicles a period of renewed conflict that profoundly affected Kurdish comm-unities, while exploring issues of discrimination, identity, language rights, and political struggle.
As new efforts toward dialogue and peace emerge, WRITING RESISTANCE provides an essential guide to understanding the recent history, lived realities, and future challenges of the Kurdish question.
Compelling, courageous, and urgent, WRITING RESISTANCE is both a witness to recent history and a call for justice, recognition, and lasting peace.
‘Nurcan Baysal has shown how to act as an intellectual under difficult conditions in dark times, always standing on the side of truth, and despite threats and oppression, she has persistently continued to speak and write. She is a rare voice for our times.’
– Burhan Sonmez, President, PEN International
‘A compassionate book that opens completely different windows to look at the Kurdish issue, the village and the villager, the educated and the uneducated, development and poverty, life as a whole.’
– goodreads reviewer
Nurcan Baysal is a Kurdish human rights defender, journalist and writer. She was born and grew up in Diyarbakır. She has worked for poverty and development programs at the United Nations Development Programme and various other non-governmental organizations. Following the ISIS attacks in 2014 she volunteered for the establishment of Yazidi camps in Northern Iraq and Turkey. Baysal is a founder of the Diyarbakır Institute for Political and Social Research (DISA), the Development Centre Association in Diyarbakır and the Platform to Save Women Kidnapped by ISIS. She is also one of the Middle East advisors of the Global Fund for Women and the Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism. Among her books are Those Voices-Diyarbakır: A City Under Siege, published online in English. Since 2013, Baysal has been featured as a columnist in various newspapers and media outlets. Her articles focus on human rights violations, poverty, refugees, humanitarian issues and the Kurdish question. She is a member of PEN Turkey and an honorary member of English PEN.
Baysal won the Women’s World Summit Foundation (WWSF) Prize for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life in 2010 and the “Turkey’s Changemakers” award in 2012 for her work in poverty alleviation. In 2017, she was awarded the “Brave Women Journalists Award” presented by the Italian Women Journalists Association. In 2018, she was named Global Laureate for Human Rights Defenders at Risk by Front Line Defenders. She also received the Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award in 2020.
Burhan Sönmez
Burhan is a Kurdish novelist from Turkey. A recipient of the Hemingway Award and the Vaclav Havel Award, Sönmez currently serves as the president of PEN International.
He is a Senior Member of Hughes Hall College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of seven novels. His novels are North (Kuzey, 2009), Sins & Innocents (Masumlar, 2011), Istanbul Istanbul (2015), Labyrinth (Labirent, 2018), Stone and Shadow (Taş ve Gölge, 2021), Lovers of Franz K. (Evîndarên Franz K., 2024), Red Mirror (Neynika Sor, 2026).
His novels have been translated into fifty-three languages. He was awarded the Hemingway Award as “Witness of Our Time” in Italy (2026), the EBRD Literature Prize in Britain (2018) and the “Disturbing the Peace” award of Vaclav Havel Foundation in the USA (2017). In Turkey, he received Orhan Kemal Novel Award (2022), BUYAZ Best Story Honour Prize (2015), the Sedat Simavi Literature Prize (2011) and Izmir St. Joseph Best Novel Award (2011).
His novel Stone and Shadow won the Annibal Caro Translation Award (2023) and has been nominated for Premio Strega Europeo (2023) and Dublin Literary Award (2024).
He translated the poetry book of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake into Turkish.
Anjan Sundaram
Anjan is a journalist, author, television presenter and artist who began his career covering the world’s deadliest war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. After two decades of writing about dictatorship and forgotten conflicts, he is now focusing his pen on environmental wars. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and Granta magazine, and has presented television shows about artificial intelligence, travel and politics. He is the author of the award-winning memoirs , and . In his art, Sundaram expresses the heavy emotions he accumulates in war zones so he can continue elevating the inspiring humanity he finds in the world’s most dangerous places. Sundaram spoke about how art can transform the news at TEDxCalle Aldama in 2025. He is a TED Fellow.
Event venue & nearby stays
Amnesty International London, 1 Easton Street,, London, United Kingdom
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