Most recently, Ege has been leading efforts to create “the Young Writers Committee” and setting up the platform Tomorrow Club – to amplifying brave young voices around the world.
He has also now joined the new Arts & Journalism team at Correctiv, a renowned non-profit journalism network, to bring the authors that he works with in the Tomorrow Club into the spotlight in Germany and beyond.
His debut poetry collection “All These Things Aren’t Really Lost” was published in 2022, and his writing has been published in outlets such as Milliyet Daily, Index on Censorship, Daily Mirror, PEN Transmissions, Bosla Arts, Counterpoints Arts and Mentour Magazins.
So you’re the youngest board member of Penn in 100 years! Congratulations- it’s very impressive.
Ege Dündar:Thankyou. It did take me 8 years!
What do you think the opportunities are now that you’re on the board?
It has been really fascinating. Before, it was harder to reach the people I wanted to work with to make a difference. Now, people will have more intimate conversations with me about what they think some of the solutions are, and, people do listen to me more! Important stakeholders started seeing me and my ideas as more of a way forward, particularly on how to engage with youth, because a lot of people feel they don’t know what to do.
Any downsides to being a board member?
I guess the biggest thing is that when you’re a board member, you can’t get paid! Suddenly you understand why board members are older- they don’t need the income! I, however, am still 30 years old, and when I became a board member I was 28. So it did create a complicated situation and I had to gently suggest that I can’t live on nothing. I was able to work with PEN Norway on a consultancy basis for a project that would benefit the entire movement: The Young Writers Committee and the Tomorrow Club. We built a new website and older members of PEN centres around the world enlisted at least one young member from their centre or country into the group.
Was it challenging to set up a whole new network? What differences did you notice between countries?
At first, it’s was a very challenging idea. Ten of us from different places and backgrounds formed a steering group working on the rules, the organisation and the co-ordination. We did surveys and a Iot of listening. I can’t say that I know definitively the formula for every region and every country, but I learnt a lot about each countries different needs, and more importantly perhaps, about the common needs.
I feel lucky to be a young person in this lead position, building a coalition of youth. I’ve been so inspired and empowered by the fact that people show up from all corners of the world saying, “I’m in, I’m in, I’m in!” They all have such passionate ideas and stories and interesting approaches to writing and the future. It’s inspiring everyone in the movement.
Do you feel there can be a tension between celebrating the vision and passion of youth, and passing the buck to a generation with limited power. Older generations can feel like they get a pass because the young people will sort everything out- and people have been saying that for decades!
I guess the youth have been the drivers of change across history. So whether that’s from a position of responsibility or not, they have often been the people who drive with their passion and cause revolutions. I think that’s what we’re trying to capitalise on now, because there is such little interest- you don’t hear about a documentary about brave young people around the world, you don’t see young writers’ organisations, and you don’t see the young as a movement so much as in the past.
Do you mean it’s more likely an individual young person that gets traction, rather than a group?
Yes, it’s oftentimes this poster child kind of thing- they take a picture and off they go- maybe of an emerging writer or something like that. I think we need to really think about organising around them and supporting these people in an organisational manner.
There’s obviously a great diversity amongst young peope all over the world. How do you bring them all together?
A young person from Turkey isn’t the same as a young person from Togo, and a young person from Sri Lanka is very different to a young person in the U.S. So it’s almost too ambitious to think that we can all unite under a one- word banner of youth. But actually, when I meet all these people they say the same things- they can’t afford rent, they have corrupt politicians, they don’t have access to opportunities. We are all global citizens suffering from the same global trends. And nearly every political movement, even if their ideologies are completely different, always say they want to improve the same things. I think we are reaching a global perspective that’s far more profound than globalism in the economic sense.
Can you tell us about last years writer-in-abscence at Ubud Writers – the #Empty Chair- who has now been recently released following a sustained campaign?
Amanda Echainis is a Philippines based writer, who was charged with making terrorist propaganda- a classic way to shut down descent. She became a kind of a mobiliser for young people to realise that not everyone our age is free, and not everyone has the privilege to express themselves, and to wonder if there is hope or not. Hope is a luxury in itself.
Echainis wrote a beautiful piece to pen/opp magazine about her father’s struggle as an activist in the Philippines, and you can really see the generational continuity there – about struggle and what they have given. She’s a very brave person, and is an example of many writers who are prosecuted for speaking truth to power. I hope we can make her famous globally, so that now she is out, there’s a world of people and places waiting to invite her to come and tell people about her experiences.
The #Empty Chair posters at literary festivals and other gatherings are very poignant- can you tell us how you see them?
#Empty Chairs are so important. We must never forget those people who are on the front line. Autocratic tendencies are building all over the world, and the wave is coming closer and closer – from the U.S., to England. These people are showing us what the problem is and how to cope with it and not to bow to it. We should take courage from their stance.
Sometimes helping someone in this position is about writing postcards. Other times it’s about writing poetry to the person. I find that often the people who are the most oppressed in the hardest conditions, shine the brightest. They just show us the way.
Changing a whole country can be hard- how do you feel about that tension between the country and the individual?
I feel one life is a world of its own, and if you can’t do anything about Thailand, and you can’t do anything about Turkey, doing one thing for one person can still change the entire life of that person. That is so profound and we should be humbled by that. It can be too dark to say ‘how many other people are imprisoned, what is the point of one person getting out.’
When my dad was in prison I was 19 years old, and my whole life stopped.
Do you remember how that felt?
I couldn’t move on with with my life, I couldn’t have fun, I was suddenly pulled away from jolly friends who were just enjoying life. I felt so isolated. The fact that people cared, which meant there was a campaign and he was released, meant I was able to be free again and be myself.
How long was your father in prison for?
It was 92 days, so we were really lucky. He left the country after that, and now its worse- there are journalists who have been in prison for six or seven years. My father was shot at and we lost everything, but, there’s something amazing about how his voice was heard by the international community. When he was arrested, there were only 15 Turkish writers in prison. After the coup attempt, that jumped to 150.
You and your family have left Turkey now and are living in Germany. Is that where you are all settled now?
We can’t go back to Turkey -it’s been seven years now. My father has a 27- year jail sentence in Turkey, so he definitely can’t go back, but the reason I can’t return is twofold, and one of the reasons is my mom. Our family was separated to three different countries when dad left. Once out of prison my dad quickly went to do a residency in Spain and people told him not to go back.
My mom tried to meet him, but her passport was taken away- without any crime, nothing. They just said it was national security issues. She fought this in the courts for three years. Eventually she escaped on a boat and then through Greece. Those three years were really tough for me, because I was claiming asylum in the U.K., not having the right to work, not having the right to rent. And I was living in a warehouse with nine other people. I lost my family, my country, and my identity. I felt very fragile in those years and it was hard. Mom had to watch my graduation on Zoom in tears. Now we have really rediscovered a strong sense of family.
Do you all hang out together all the time?
I’m currently living with them in Berlin after becoming a U.K. citizen. Most people around my age, maybe from 20 to late 40s kind of split from their family and they sort of never look back. For me its been this reconnection at this age. We watch movies together, we talk about life. Getting that close to the family maybe has its negative sides, but I’m a single child too, so I can’t exactly relate to anyone else in the family! The solidarity of our family has kept us going, especially for my parents when they were trying to learn German in their massively downsized life.
There’s a large Turkish diaspora in Germany- do you connect with the community?
The reaction to dad in Germany can be mixed. Some people have been incredibly kind. Dad has been a columnist for nearly 40 years, and he’s written many books and done lots of documentaries. So people respect that. A lot of people say that they learned Turkish history through him. Sometimes people invite dad for dinner, someone might open up their cinema for a little event on dad’s movies, and sometimes we can be on holiday and people say, ‘We miss you in Turkey,’ and ‘We think of you.’ This is really heartwarming. People take pictures with him and stuff like that.
Lets talk about the themes in debut poetry collection All These Things Aren’t Really Lost
I’ve been trying to write poetry since I was 16. I think the earliest piece is from when I was about 15, about moving from the back seat of the car to the front seat. So my poetry goes back way before I had any of these troubles, but I think the main driver of it has been pain that I can’t put anywhere. I’ve been hurting a lot from losing my Grandpa and watching his funeral on FaceTime, from losing my identity, and my country, but you can’t talk about most of these things to anybody.
Did you feel that people didn’t want to hear about it?
In a place like London, where I was living, people say – ‘I’ll see you when you’re better.’ Whereas in Turkey, if you’re sick, people will bring you soup and try to heal you. Even some friends told me- ‘I don’t think you should be talking to me about this, you should be talking to a therapist!’
So where do all those feelings go? I didn’t feel like I wanted to upset my parents, they had it hard, and they might think I’m kind of falling apart. So poetry became a way for me to express different emotions in different ways.
It sometimes felt like a fly, circling a lamp, trying to get in and see the light, but getting hurt the closer it gets. There’s expression of feelings in what happens around us in tiny details. I love that poetry can do that.
And one of the themes is loss?
There is a lot about exile. There’s a poem looking at Turkey from the other side of the border with a train going south, and I can’t take it. There are these kinds of stories, but the more I dug into it, the more I realised there’s something that we all lose, whether someone dies or we get exiled from ourself. There are different versions of you that you can’t return to. And the exodus from the self became the more philosophical aspect for me to explore.
And that’s why the title is All These Things Aren’t Really Lost, because I kept trying to convince myself that all these things I miss, whether it’s a place, whether it’s my grandparents, I can’t just say they’re lost because that’s such a disservice to what they’ve meant to me.
All those years that I was there, that I was loved, that I was joyous, how can I just say- ‘Because they’re gone, they’re in the past now, so let’s forget about it.’ They are somewhere inside of me, in my tastebuds, in music I like, in all kinds of ways.
Does having a physical book that you can hold make the memories feel more concrete?
These poems are my building blocks. I do feel a bit more settled. There’s something I can stand on. The cover of the book is a picture I took from our Istanbul house, and it shows a barbed wire fence cutting into the sun, and the sun sort of bleeding into the Bosphorus. I really love that image because it is my past and my history, and people who are interested in it can now get a copy and learn a bit about what it was like for me in an emotional sense, in a way that I can’t express just sitting someone down and explaining it all to them.
And of course that leads to literary festivals and meeting Irresistible Magazine!
Meeting poets has been amazing, because poets really do understand what it’s like to try and express yourself in poetry, even though there’s some of my poems that really make me cringe reading them now. But people did started inviting me to read and to be in poetry nights and to be at festivals which is an amazing experience. So I feel like it not only opened a way for me to express myself, but also through that to connect to lots of other people who I would have otherwise have never met.
The other work you published is Duvar, which you wrote with your father, is that right?
That was in 2010 and I was very young, so I think I was really oblivious to what writing is at the time. It was a project where well known writers in Turkey were asked to write a book with their children. My mom was involved as well, but she’s not credited!
The idea we had was that there’s a wall between Greek and Turkish children, and how can they circumvent it and meet? My first idea was that 20 toy soldiers should gun it down, but my parents encouraged me to think of something else! So in the end, the story came to be about an olive tree that’s in between the children, with its branches reaching over the wall, and one day, the kids go out there, and discovered they have these friends, but there’s an eagle guarding over the wall, and this eagle is the USA. Tthey passed messages with doves and they strategised- they watered the olive tree and the roots intermingled with the bricks and gradually the tree grew enough to tear down the wall. It became my life story in a way. We had these walls that that we were kept behind, but we kept watering the olive tree. Eventually, they take the olives and they shoo the eagle away.
As a child, it was amazing to see this story turn into a book in a bookshop, and a play was made with Greek and Turkish kids on stage. My passion for literature was really ignited then. I highly suggest anyone with kids to try and write a fable with them. It could change everything!
How do you see the future of resistance in Turkey?
There’s a saying by famous Turkish writer Yaşar Kemal who says ‘Confronting fear is the greatest tenet of man. May your troubles increase so your remedy comes sooner.’
Its about the solutions coming out of bad situations and coming quicker the worse everything is. There are a lot of bright and beautiful people in prison who have served their cities, and who have served the people around them so well. Their reactions are only going to grow. There are rallies every week, students are up in arms. Every year in the Women’s March, you see more and more women coming out, and the streets look incredibly colouful and brave when you see them facing off against the police, and getting beaten, and still getting up. The same goes for LGBTQIA+ rights. There are moves to criminalise the community, and that is a driver of passionate resistance.
It makes me very emotional and inspired because a lot of these people can’t leave the country- they’re fighting their own fight, and it is keeping the autocracy a little in check, even though things are getting worse, I still feel the majority of the people are against it, and they will remain against it, regardless of what happens.
