Barış Uzunhan

Born in Elazığ in 1979, labour induced. After a childhood and youth spent in Elazığ, Burdur, Çarşamba (Samsun), Konya, Etimesgut (Ankara), Kütahya, Ankara and Antalya, he came to Istanbul, following the steps his father described in his book Hekat . He worked with photography from his early university years onward. He graduated from Yıldız Technical University in industrial engineering and became a white-collar worker, as though that were badly needed. He began putting his thoughts on paper in secondary school. In 2017 his first book of stories, An Utterly Improbable Alternative History of Istanbul , was published. From those same school years he built various ties with the world. One of them is the postcard collection he keeps for his son Toprak, which they named "Başka Toprakların Renkleri / Colors of Other Lands"; he publishes the cards arriving from every corner of the world at colorsofotherlands.com . The imagined story he built out of that collection became his second book, the novel Colors of Other Lands . He also published Hekat , the autobiographical book of stories he encouraged his father to write. He passed on the proceeds of Hekat and An Utterly Improbable Alternative History of Istanbul to young people as education grants. He holds that ironing is unnecessary, that people are arrogant, that the sipsi has the power to shake dance floors the world over, and that living in Istanbul (in any city past two and a half to three million, really) makes no sense — a critical and dissenting turn of mind. While he suspects that his admiration for Ferhan Şensoy, their shared hometown, and learning German at an early age have all shaped the way he uses language, he strongly objects to The Little Prince , Momo and The Sand Wolf being sold in the children's section, and cannot make sense of the Harry Potter series being better known than the Earthsea trilogy.