On 22 September 2026, Suzan Samancı, an award-winning writer from Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey, was detained by police at Istanbul airport and charged with ‘making propaganda for a terrorist organisation’ over social media posts dating back to 2014, some of which supported Kurdish rights. She was subsequently released and placed under a travel ban. 

Based in Switzerland since 2008, Samancı had not returned to Turkey since the failed coup attempt of July 2016 and the crackdown that followed. She was travelling to seek the removal of a passport restriction that has complicated her Swiss residency status. She has been repeatedly targeted by the Turkish authorities because of her Kurdish identity and writings, through judicial harassment and threats of violence. The Turkish Consulate in Geneva has refused to renew her passport since 2023, and left her requests for information unanswered.

Samancı, now sixty-four, published her first poems in the magazine Sanat Olayı in 1985. From 1995 to 2011, she worked as a columnist for the newspapers Gündem, Demokrasi, Özgür Politika and Taraf, with a focus on art, aesthetics, women’s rights and Kurdish rights. Her breakout literary success was the publication of Reçine kokuyordu Helîn (Hêlin Smells like Resin) in 1993. Her stories have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and French, and her latest novel, Payîz an jî Ziyab (Autumn or Winter), was published by Avesta in 2024. 

In her writing she addresses the suppression of Kurdish language and culture. In a 2023 piece translated by Joakim Wrethed and published by Swedish PEN, Samancı writes, ‘To oppressed people, art can be the thing that keeps the dream alive, that shows the way out, through itself being a zone of freedom.’ Kurdish literature, she notes, is ‘closely related to the history of the Kurdish people’. Because Kurdish has been ‘a forbidden language’ in Turkey, the literature has been passed down by word of mouth rather than in writing, which has made the oral culture ‘very rich’.

The Turkish authorities’ crackdown on Kurdish and opposition voices continues unabated. Another case is Kurdish sociologist and human-rights defender Güllistan Yarkın, who faces a prison term for her academic research. Yarkın’s work focuses on antiracism, colonialism, social movements, Kurdish studies and Turkish-Kurdish relations. She is accused of ‘denigrating’ the Turkish nation, the state, the Grand National Assembly and the judicial bodies under Article 301 of Turkey’s Criminal Code, for which she could face between six months and two years in prison.

The charges are in response to Yarkın’s PhD dissertation, ‘The Making of National-Racial Formation and Coloniality in Türkiye: Turkish-Kurdish Relations in a Working-Class District of Zeytinburnu in Istanbul, 1950–2017’, completed in 2017 in the Sociology Department at the State University of New York. In 2020, the Interuniversity Board in Turkey rejected Yarkın’s application for diploma equivalence, attesting that some of the statements made in her dissertation may constitute a crime under Article 7/2 of Anti-Terror Law No 3713 and Article 301 of the Criminal Code, provisions repeatedly used by the authorities to silence dissenting voices.

Although her dissertation has not yet been published, the Public Prosecutor’s office in Ankara issued an indictment on 17 August 2026 under Article 301 of the Criminal Code. Her trial opened in Ankara on 6 October. Yarkın is currently a guest researcher at the University of Hamburg as a Philipp Schwartz Initiative fellow – the programme allows researchers who are subject to significant personal threat in their country of origin to continue their work at German universities and research institutions. Ongoing criminal proceedings threaten Yarkın’s ability to return to Turkey. The next hearing is scheduled for 14 January 2027. 

‘Güllistan Yarkın’s academic writings challenge official narratives and have made her a target of the authorities of Turkey, who continue to muzzle independent voices. The case against her sends a chilling warning to all writers and academics who dare explore difficult themes and must be dropped at once,’ said Burhan Sönmez, PEN International president.

Publishers are also feeling the pressure. In July, Berfin Bahçekapılı, a reader of this column, wrote to us on behalf of Livera Publishing, an independent publishing house based in Turkey, to draw attention to an act of intimidation. One of Livera’s books, Kim Bo-young’s Origin of Species, translated from Korean into Turkish by Mehmet Ölçer, was targeted during the 2025 İzmir Book Fair. It’s set in a future where humans have vanished and explores life, consciousness, evolution and the ethics of artificial intelligence. An anonymous individual left a copy of the book embedded with a handgun bullet. The incident was reported to the police and a criminal investigation was launched, but the fair’s organisers said there were too few cameras to identify the perpetrator. 

In February 2026, the Turkish Publishers Association honoured Livera Publishing with its 2025 Freedom of Thought and Expression Award. On the same night, awards were presented to journalists Timur Soykan, Murat Ağırel and İsmail Arı, all of whom have faced threats, legal prosecution or detention because of their reporting and criticism of political developments in Turkey.