Burhan Sönmez | The PEN Ten
A tribute to Kafka, Burhan Sönmez’s Lovers of Franz K., translated by Sami Hêzil, explores the impact that one writer’s work can have on not only an individual but on a political moment. Recreating the period of the Cold War in expert prose, two opposing characters later become partners in an expedition to expose who truly was behind the attempted assination of Kafka’s best friend, Max Brod.
In conversation with Summer Lopez, PEN America Interim Co-CEO and Chief Program Officer of Free Expression, Sönmez discusses why he chose to explore this narrative, his relationship to place and story, and why imagining a better future is crucial to the time we’re living in. Lovers of Franz K. is published by Other Press, 2025. (Bookshop; Barnes & Noble)
Burhan Sönmez, President of PEN International, will be at the 2025 World Voices Festival for our Opening Night The PEN and the State: The Role of Novelists in Times of Crisis and in PEN America and PEN International Present: On Autocracy and the Slow Death of Democracy
What made you decide to write a book about Kafka? Why did this feel like the right story to tell in this particular historical moment?
Who owns a book? The author, the reader, or the publisher? The same question can be asked about truth. Where does the truth lie, in the hands of individuals, corporations, or governments? When I asked these questions about Kafka’s life, I found myself following terms like ethics, understanding, and tolerance. We know that these terms are ambiguous and open to interpretation, especially in a political context. So, focusing on this matter, I decided to give Kafka another chance to be reinterpreted in a socio-political setting during the Cold War. This provided me the foundation to touch issues like the ’68 student uprising in Paris and West Berlin, antisemitism, resistance against fascism and beyond.
The other layer of this book is the language I wrote it in. When I was thinking about this story, I wanted to write it in Kurdish, my mother tongue. This would be the first for me after writing five novels in Turkish. Kurdish has been oppressed for a century and is still belittled in my homeland, which is occupied by four different countries in the Middle East. The occupying countries call it “mountain language” to despise it, as Harold Pinter addresses in his wonderful play Mountain Language. Until I reached the age of 26, Kurdish was officially banned. It is now said to be “free” but it cannot be used freely in education or anywhere else. When a Kurdish MP speaks Kurdish in parliament, it is recorded in the official minutes of the Turkish Parliament as “the speaker is speaking in an unknown language.” Unlike Turkish, our alphabet has letters such as Q, X, W, which are still not allowed to be used, for example, when naming your child. It’s not just a whole language, it’s even a single letter. When Franz Kafka used the word K as a name in his stories, it was perhaps his initial, but it was also a mirror for me to see my own letters, rejected but still trying to survive. When the protagonist in my novel speaks during the trial in court, he knows this well: “Every single letter of our names has a meaning.”
The book hinges on the story of Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s best friend, who published some of Kafka’s work after his death, against his explicit wishes, and also altered them. So it really gets at this question of who art “belongs” to, and how or whether art exists independent from the artist. Is that one of the things you were trying to explore by writing this book, and how do you think about that question?
Since I wrote a novel about this question, I avoid talking about it and prefer to let my story do the talking and explore this topic.
Could you talk about the format of the book? Sometimes it is written in the style of the script of a play, and other times it reads more like the prose of a novel. I found that a delight to read, but I’m curious what made you decide to write it this way, and what was that experience like?
When I got to the stage of taking notes and reading to develop the story, I started to visualize the scene in the police station interrogation room. It was running in dialogues, but I didn’t want to write it like a play. I knew there were some really good examples of novels written in that style. For example, Max Frisch or Ariel Dorfman wrote great books like that. I decided to combine the form of dialogue with prose narrative and repeat it in each chapter throughout the book. Every new novel is a risk-taking venture, I wrote this book with that in mind.
That’s the magic of a book. You feel like a baby recognizing itself in a mirror for the first time and being amazed, and we feel the same thing with every great work of literature, no matter what age you are.
Kafka’s significant impact on the main character, Ferdy, is clear. What was the first book or piece of writing that had a profound impact on you?
I think we experience this over and over again at different ages. For example, when I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a teenager, I was astonished, or when I read Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in my 20s, I was as enchanted as if I were reading a novel for the first time. That’s the magic of a book. You feel like a baby recognizing itself in a mirror for the first time and being amazed, and we feel the same thing with every great work of literature, no matter what age you are.
If I go back to the beginning, that is the emergence of my being, I have to mention the power of oral literature, that is, the Kurdish tales my mother told us when we were little in our small village. There was no television, not even electricity, my mother was like the creator of that little world in the dim light of the gas lamp. I was nourished by those tales and breathed the air of those eternal nights.
For me, this story referenced and interrogated many debates we’ve seen in the literary world in recent years. For example, the idea of editing books to change language that is now deemed distasteful, and the question of whether a writer’s personal behavior should affect how we judge their work. Were all these recent debates in your head as you wrote the book, and how do you think about them yourself?
There were many debates in my mind and I was trying to understand the conflicting arguments through my characters in the story. When I finished my novel, I saw the news that Marquez’s posthumous novel Until August was going to be published. Despite telling his sons that the story was not good enough and should never be published, his sons published it and wrote a foreword to the book in which they said that the sons were born to betray their father. Then, not long after, the news came that his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was going to be adapted for television, despite his strong and clear opposition to the idea of making the novel into a movie. This is not just a legal debate about copyright, but also a moral, social and philosophical debate. While I tried to give voice to different arguments in my novel, I ultimately wanted to leave room for the understanding and value of the author, the reader and the work of art itself.
Much of this story takes place in a divided Berlin, but also touches Istanbul, Paris, and Tel Aviv. What is your relationship to place and story?
When I was in primary school, we moved to a town a couple hours away from the village. In town, I missed my village. When I went to Istanbul to study law at university, I missed my town and my village. When I had to go abroad to live in exile for political reasons, I missed my Istanbul, my town and my village. I feel like I am torn apart and that my pieces are everywhere I have lived. At the same time I feel like every place I lived is also alive in my mind and heart. I am made up of the places I lived in and my stories would not be possible without a single one of them.
The book also delves into questions of guilt and judgement, though I would argue it deliberately avoids judging any of its characters or subjects, leaving the reader to see them as the complicated people they are. It’s part of the idea behind PEN that literature can help us see each other in all our human complexity, and remind us to avoid easy judgements, and that is particularly important in deeply polarized or divided societies. Is that also something you were trying to illustrate with this book?
Are we ready to listen to and hear the others? Are we ready to accept that we might have been wrong, as we try to convince others that they might be wrong? This is the basic understanding of living in a society with people who are different from us, different in ideology, culture and so on. We should also see that in some cases there is no absolute right and wrong. Both of them have some elements from the other. It is especially a case in my novel, so I tried to show this in the friendship of Kafka and Max Brod.
You have personally faced oppression and violence for your work and your activism. How does that affect you as a writer now?
This is a moral choice in life. Do you want to be a creator of your life by influencing the events around you, or do you want to be shaped by the socio-political environment you live in? Of course, a utopian world would be a beautiful place where no one is afraid, and as a writer, I can write whatever I want without being threatened with censorship, hate speech, or murder. Just before I sat down to answer your questions, I spoke to two writers in different countries, one who is being censored for his novel, the other who is trying to find a safe country after being released from prison and recently beat cancer. This is the situation we are in. Each of us has a song in our hearts. We want to sing it through our books, sometimes with the colors of politics, sometimes without those shadowy colors. For myself, I feel that in each book I try to create a new form of truth and beauty. It is my challenge to oppression.
I am an incurable optimist, because I believe in acting for good things for everyone, and I am happy to see that those who continue to create beauty and fight for humanity are still strong enough to bother the authorities.
As President of PEN International, you are all too familiar with the threats currently facing writers and free expression around the world. What worries you most in this moment? What gives you hope?
Losing our sense of resistance to evil and forgetting to imagine a better tomorrow, that would be a danger to humanity. I am an incurable optimist, because I believe in acting for good things for everyone, and I am happy to see that those who continue to create beauty and fight for humanity are still strong enough to bother the authorities. That is why they continue to censor us, imprison us, and develop new tools through social media platforms and surveillance systems to silence us. That means the struggle continues, because history continues.
What advice do you have for young writers?
Do they really need to hear our advice? Real advice is the life we make and the practices we develop. Do it yourself and let people see and decide. Young writers have the opportunity to follow and understand the state of literature and the world in general, without our intervention. Instead of advice, we should be offering them something beyond words. It can be an act of solidarity. When they need help and support, whether socially or intellectually, we should be ready to be there.
Burhan Sönmez is the author of six novels. He is president of PEN International and a Senior Member of Hughes Hall College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His novels have been translated into forty-eight languages and received international prizes, including the EBRD Literature Prize and Vaclav Havel Center Award. He was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before going to Britain for political reasons and living there in exile for several years. He has been on the judging panel of various events, including Inge Feltrinelli Prize and Geneva International Film Festival and written for press such as La Repubblica, Der Spiegel and The Guardian. He has translated the poetry book of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake into Turkish. Having written five novels in Turkish, he began to write in his mother tongue, Kurdish, with his last novel Lovers of Franz K.. He lives between Cambridge and Istanbul.
