Nehir Yalın

Nehir Yalın was born in 1978 in Sinop, in a house that looked onto the harbour. Her father was a caulker at the shipyard, her mother a primary school teacher. It was a house where the sound of the sea and the smell of paper shared a room; in her own words, “my first sentence was the name of a ship”.

She graduated in Turkish Language and Literature from Istanbul University in 2001 and joined the culture desk of a daily newspaper the same year. For eleven years she wrote reportage on the disappearing crafts of Anatolia, abandoned villages and the routes people take when they leave. The notebooks from those journeys became the source of every novel she later wrote.

Her first book, The Silent Map (2013), distilled those trips into essays. Three years later came her first novel, Kırkikindi: a woman returns to the village after a flood and looks for the house that stayed under the water. It reached fifteen thousand readers and was shortlisted for the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize.

The Eclipse Notebook, published in 2019, won the Sait Faik Story Award. The jury praised “a language that makes the voices at the margin audible without ever raising them”.

The Wind Gatherers (2021) became her most widely read book, translated into German, French, Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, Persian, Arabic and English. Her latest novel, The Light at the Bottom of the Well, appeared in 2024 and went through seven printings in its first year.

Yalın spends half the year in a garden house in Sinop and half in Istanbul. She takes part in around twenty talks a year at schools and book clubs, and writes a short letter to readers every two months. Her new novel, The Book of the North Wind, will be published in autumn 2026.