Wûf
By Kemal Varol Translated by Dayla Rogers
A metaphorical love story that grapples with memory, storytelling, and vengeance in a time of war
“[Wûf] proves its author to be as strong an emerging talent as Elif Shafak or Orhan Pamuk were upon their anglophone debuts...Wûf is an excellent contribution to the literary consideration of war’s many damages and will no doubt continue to be an important cultural referent for the Kurdish-Turkish conflict in the Turkish cultural imagination. I won’t be surprised to see it on 2020’s 'best of' lists.” -World Literature Today
Told through the voice of a canine narrator, Wûf is a surrealist wartime love story set in Turkey in the 1990s. The novel follows Mikasa, a street dog who recounts a tale of tragic wartime love at a kennel where he finds solace in storytelling and cigarettes. A book that took the Turkish literary world by storm, Kemal Varol’s Wûf tackles universal themes of love and loss with both humor and pathos. Translated by PEN/Heim Award winner Dayla Rogers, the novel renders in English a one-of-a-kind love story with a narrator its readers won’t soon forget. Kemal Varol began his literary career as a poet. Wûf (originally titled Haw) received the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize and the Bursa Contemporary Journalists’ Association 2015 Peace Prize. Dayla Rogers is a translator and educator based in Istanbul. In 2016 she received a finalist ribbon for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Translation Competition and in 2017 she received a PEN/HEIM Translation Fund Grant.
University of Texas Press January 2020 9781477319482 170pp £13.99 PB CMES Emerging Voices from the Middle East Books stocked at Marston Book Services Tel: +44 (0)1235 465500 | enquiries@combinedacademic.co.uk www.combinedacademic.co.uk