‘Each of us has a song’
Burhan Sönmez, now the president of PEN International, was a rising human rights lawyer in Turkey. A brutal assault nearly killed him – and propelled him to a life in literature
by Kaya Genç
Kaya Genç is a European Press Prize laureate and the author of five books: Macera (2008), An Istanbul Anthology (2015), Under the Shadow (2016), The Lion and the Nightingale (2019) and Şehir (2025).
Written by Kaya Genç