A new life
2026’s first newsletter
Dear readers,
Apologies for being out of touch for so long. On November 30, I announced the publication of Şehir (The City), my first novel in 17 years and went silent for almost three months.
As you may expect, book events took up a lot of time.
Poor authors even need to return to social media to promote their new books. When we aren’t doing book events, print and podcast interviews, we feel we need to ensure our books reach as broad an audience as possible.
Müge İplikçi’s interview with me on Medyascope was among the ones I enjoyed the most:
Here is another favorite: an interview with the “Frog Bey’le Oradan Buradan” podcast:
I read an excerpt from Şehir on Apaçık Radyo:
We also had book events!
First, at Robinson Crusoe 389 in Beyoğlu with Ezgi Yurteri.
Then at İstanbul Kitapçısı in Kadıköy with my publisher and editor İlknur Özdemir.
Şehir even reached the kitchen of Selçuk Tepeli, Turkey’s most popular news anchor, and he filmed a video reading it on his kitchen table:
Much to my surprise, it became a best-seller on Amazon’s Turkish store…
… and at Pandora Nişantaşı, my favorite bookstore in Istanbul.
In the past few days, I’ve had the good fortune to receive rave reviews from the literary magazines K24 and Sabitfikir.
“Şehir is one of the novels that will be permanent in our literature,” writes Sabri Gürses, in Sabitfikir’s February 2026 issue.
“I call Şehir a phenomenonological narrative. Genç surveys the beginning of the 2000s; this is a historical novel, and keeps a record of a period when Turkey went through an important transformation… It successfully questions an era and an environment with the camera of language… Genç’s style, which finds a balance between a calm, diary and a documentary language, may seem easy and comfortable from the outside, but it is not: here, a good historian’s success in reviving a certain moment of a period has been realised.”
Kerem Görkem was even more generous in his K24 review:
“In our contemporary literature, the autofiction genre has had a limited reach… but Şehir may be signalling its rise… Kaya Genç’s new novel strongly reveals how fragile and risky writing autofiction in Turkey is even today. This brave work perhaps paves the way for dozens of other autofictions in the future... This novel, which comes after a sixteen-year wait after his debut, is the product of Kaya Genç’s patient and persistent relationship with literature.”
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But there was something—someone!—more exciting than any of this stuff who arrived in my life in the past three months: a baby girl. She was born 39 days after Şehir came out and I couldn’t be more excited.
A novelist friend e-mailed me in the hospital, noting the difficulties of writing with a newborn at home. Somehow, I’ve never been more productive or ecstatic.
Caring for the baby imposed its own time system on my life: I look after the newborn and my texts in quick succession, trying to ensure they’re in good health and shape. I feel they need my constant, ceaseless attention—and I try to give it to them with love and compassion.
Until next time,
—Kaya
An abundance of good news! ❤️
Heartfelt congratulations. Have to get a friend bring it to me from Turkey. So much looking forward to reading it. And enjoy your new baby, it is a pure joy.