The novelist Cengiz Dağcı (1919–2011) remains esteemed in his own country, but unknown across Europe. All his works are in print in Turkey, where he received many awards during his lifetime, and was praised for his ability to write fiction based on autobiographical experience and to deal with controversial subjects, notably the fate of Turkic and Tatar peoples under Russian and Soviet rule.

Publishers can be parochial, but the main reason for Dağcı’s obscurity is his own modesty – his immersion in what he called ‘solitude and memories’. Born a Crimean Tatar in Gurzuf, on the southern coast of Crimea, and educated in Akmescit (Simferopol), he experienced turbulence and tragedy for the next twenty-seven years: the bloody end of the civil war in the USSR, the famine of 1922, the confiscation of Tatar land, collectivisation and deportation, his father’s imprisonment by the Soviet secret police, the Great Terror of 1937–8, then conscription into the Red Army, the horrors of the Nazi invasion and capture, followed by a year of starvation, cold and ‘death marches’ as a PoW. In May 1942, when the Nazis, to keep Turkey from joining the war, formed a Turkestan Legion from Muslim Soviet PoWs, Dağcı became a lieutenant and fought the Russians, before rebelling against his German commanders, losing close friends and his Crimean homeland forever.

At the war’s end, Dağcı married a Polish girl and they both escaped repatriation (and death) in the USSR by claiming asylum in Britain. He found work in London and was soon running a restaurant in Dalston, cooking by day and writing by night for decades to come. As a