Savkar Altinel Author & Translator

Savkar Altinel was born in Istanbul. After completing secondary education there, he left Türkiye and studied English literature at the University of Chicago and the University of Glasgow. He then carved out a literary career for himself by continuing to live in Britain while writing in Turkish. A combination that could easily have turned him into the traditional victim “caught between two cultures” becomes, in his case, a source of strength that enables him to view everything with the cold, dispassionate gaze of a passing stranger. Widely recognised in his country of birth as a poet and a translator of English poetry whose range includes work by Donne, Coleridge, Kipling, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, he is also known for a number of genre-bending prose works deftly blending travel writing and auto-fiction. Sometimes compared to W. G. Sebald in this respect, but very much with preoccupations and a voice of his own, he is one of the most interesting and significant figures in contemporary Turkish literature.