Turkey: An evening with İlhan Çomak and Jan Wagner
How does one make it through 30 years in prison? When, at the age of 21, you become the victim of a judicial scandal that is ludicrous even by Turkish standards? In the case of İlhan Sami Çomak, the answer is literature, more precisely, poetry.
In the case of İlhan Sami Çomak, the answer also includes poetry that gives no indication of the circumstances in which it was written. Çomak has published ten volumes of poetry during his imprisonment – nine in Turkish and one in Kurdish – none of which deal with the subject of prison. It is only in his autobiographical short story »Don’t Step on the Ants« that he writes: »Being a poet means, above all, persistently striving to transcend the conditions to which one is subjected.«
The story of this judicial scandal has been documented by Can Dündar (here) and Deniz Yücel (there). But the fact that Çomak did not leave prison at the end of 2024 as a broken and embittered person has a lot to do with the power of literature.
İlhan Sami Çomak is a member of the Turkish and Kurdish PEN Centres, as well as an honorary member of the PEN Centres in Norway, Ireland and Wales. His poems have been translated into several languages and are now available in German for the first time in the volume »Take Me Away from This Silence«. The evening will be hosted by our member, the poet and Büchner Prize winner Jan Wagner.
Book premiere: »Take Me Away from This Silence: Poems«
By and with İlhan Sami Çomak
8 January, 6.30pm
Maxim Gorki Theatre, Studio Я (Hinter dem Gießhaus 2, 10117 Berlin)
In German and Turkish (with simultaneous translation).
Tickets and information available here.