Description
Novelist, poet, and internationally acclaimed visual artist Sener Ozmen is one of today’s most exciting voices in Kurdish literature. Darkly comic and profoundly moving, The Competition of Unfinished Stories marks his English-language debut.
Set in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, The Competition of Unfinished Stories shadows Sertac Karan, a vehement atheist who teaches at an Islamic school. Subjugated by the Turkish authorities, emasculated by his wife, harangued by his family and students, and jaded by prospects for a Kurdish revolution, Sertac begins to lose his mind. Seeking narrative grounding over his life in the stories he tries to write, Sertac instead finds that the eclectic characters populating his world have fully untethered him from reality. As the novel progresses, these characters—as well as the book’s author and translator—try, and fail, to take control over Sertac’s story, blurring the lines between his waking fantasies, his nightmares, and his fictions. At turns brash, hilarious, unsettling, and poignant, Sertac’s dizzying tale makes it all too clear how language, no matter which one is being used, fails us as often as it helps us.
One of the first novels from the Kurmancî dialect of Kurdish to appear in English, The Competition of Unfinished Stories is a strange and powerful exploration of the schizophrenia of life under colonial occupation that demonstrates how imagination can be more paralyzing than liberating.
Sener Ozmen is a new media artist and writer living in Wilmette, Illinois. He developed his dissident contemporary art practices over the course of the 1990s and 2000s in Istanbul and Diyarbakir. Written in his unique language, his articles on topics such as Kurdish identity, nationalism, and the production of art in conflict zones have been published in numerous international magazines and newspapers. Ozmen’s short films and video works have been shown in the world’s most respected contemporary art museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum, and Kunsthalle Fridericianum.
Nicholas Glastonbury is a writer and translator of Kurdish and Turkish literature. His translation of Sema Kaygusuz’s novel Every Fire You Tend received the 2020 TA First Translation Prize from the Society of Authors. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology.
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