Greetıngs!

İlkyaz, is a platform for young writers, established with the support of PEN International, Norwegian PEN and PEN Turkey. As the founder and coordinator of İlkyaz, I Ege Dündar, welcome you alongside our Manager Irmak Ertaş and our friends on the advisory board, Halil Gediz and Özge Sargın.

İlkyaz is a platform built to showcase and nurture the imagination of writers under 35. So our focus is young literature. But our job is exchange. In these times where divisions thrive, and interaction between people gets increasingly narrow due to political, economic or ideological boundaries, literature is a shelter for us all. It’s an avenue where we can meet beyond our differences in opinion, and witness our communal home, that is the Earth through various windows. It’s a precious common ground we can find morale in and appreciate insight into perspectives across the isle in an era besieged by a lack of communication.

Writing evolves as one reads, writes and shares. Thus, we hope İlkyaz will encourage a wave of young writers, who are growing ever more doubtful of their talents and potential due to a lack of publishing opportunities. We wish to support young voices, even when other publishers say their content is “too raw yet”

Our wish for İlkyaz is to act as a bridge. Not just between our readers and writers, but also between the first and later stages of a writers’ career – newly emerging and more established names; between young Turkish writers and writers and audiences from around the world.

What has İlkyaz got?

In the ‘Writings’ section of our website, we will be introducing three young writers every month. We will translate these works, which will be made up of a short story or a few poems, into English as İlkyaz volunteers and will endeavor to introduce these to the readers outside of Turkey. As well as the English translation, each month we will partner with a PEN Centre located in a different country around the world to have the pieces on our platform translated into their local language and shared.

This, we hope, will create new audiences for our writers in the world arena and introduce their work to the world’s literary figures. With our heartfelt gratitude, Norwegian PEN will be taking the lead on translating and sharing the works of our first set of young writers.

In the Blog section, you will find posts related but not limited to literature that will be food for thought.

On the section titled “15-“ we will make space for the imagination of writers under the age of 15, whom we don’t get to read often, and publish their short stories and poems.

In the “Human Portraits” section, we will shed a light on dozens of lives we tend to pass by in a hurry in our daily lives and share their insights through photos and short interviews.

And lastly, in the “Reading Suggestions”, we will be sharing 5 books suggested to young writers by leading authors in Turkey and around the world. I hope it will be an inspiration to us all!

Towards the end of the year we will publish an anthology of all the writes we feature on the website and distribute as widely as possible. In times to come we hope to gather the followers of our platform in events we will aim to put on in different cities.

In this age when different branches of communication are increasing their collaboration, we want İlkyaz also to be innovative, to carry fresh blood to literature whilst building a shelter for it’s long-standing tradition to make space for “video-poems”, comic books, fables and lyricists such as the recent Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. We hope to grow this vision and lay the groundwork for a setting that will inspire new generations of writers for years to come.

PEN, in its almost 100-year history, undoubtedly formed one of the worlds largest literary networks, and holds that position firmly today. We are grateful to receive their support for our project. I also would like to thank Alkamanas for designing our website, my friends in the advisory board for their support and the young writers who contributed.

Ilkyaz means spring in Turkish but is also a combination of the word “ilk” for first and “yaz” for write. I hope that much like the awakening of spring, we can pave the way for new writers and ideas to grow on our platform. We eagerly await your submission and ideas. Welcome to İlkyaz!

Ege Dündar

We are always open to your works if you would like to send them to İlkyaz! If you would like to be one of our monthly writers, you can send 1-3 poems or a short story to ilkyaz2018@gmail.com. If you are a writer under 15, you can send us your works between 300-500 words on the same address. We will evaluate the submissions with our advisory board and select those for publication, based on votes. You are also welcome to send us posts you find intriguing to be published on our blog. We await your suggestions on what we do well and what we can improve at our e-mail address.