Ebru Ojen was born in 1981 to Kurdish parents in Malatya, Turkey. In 1984, the family moved further east to Van, when her schoolteacher father was relocated by the state. After Ojen finished high school in Van, she moved to Izmir, completing her university education at Dokuz Eylul University’s Opera and Acting program. In 2014, Ojen published her striking debut novel, Aşı (Vaccine), about a state-sponsored vaccine campaign in an imaginary Kurdish village. That same year, Ojen was recognized among the ten most important emerging voices in Turkish literature. Her next novel, Let the Carnivores Kill Each Other appeared in 2017, followed by Lojman, in 2020, which City Lights will publish in English in August of 2023. She currently resides in Istanbul, Turkey. Aron Aji, Director of Translation programs at the University of Iowa, is a native of Turkey, and has translated works by modern and contemporary Turkish writers, including Bilge Karasu, Elif Shafak, Latife Tekin, Murathan Mungan, and Ferit Edgu. His Karasu translations include Death in Troy; The Garden of Departed Cats, (2004 National Translation Award); and A Long Day’s Evening (NEA Literature Fellowship; Finalist, 2013 PEN Translation Prize). His forthcoming translations are Ferid Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales (NYRB, 2022), and Mungan’s Tales of Valor (co-translated with David Gramling) (Global Humanities Translation Prize, Northwestern UP, 2022), and The Behaviour of Words by Efe Duyan (White Pine Press, 2023). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019. He currently resides in Iowa City, Iowa. Selin Gökcesu is a Brooklyn-based writer and Turkish translator. She has a PhD in psychology and an MFA in writing from Columbia University.
