Burhan Sönmez

Burhan Sönmez (born 1965) is a Kurdish novelist from Turkey. He is the President of PEN International, elected at the Centennial Congress in 2021. He is also Senior Member and a By-Fellow of Hughes Hall College, University of Cambridge.

Sönmez is the author of six novels: North (Kuzey), published in 2009 in Turkey, Sins and Innocents (Masumlar), published in 2011, Istanbul Istanbul, published in 2015, Labyrinth, published in 2018, Stone and Shadow, published in 2021, and Lovers of Franz K., published in 2024. He wrote the first five in Turkish, but the sixth in his mother tongue, Kurdish.

He received the "Disturbing the Peace" award given by Vaclav Havel Center in New York (2017). He was awarded the EBRD Literature Prize in London (2018) for his novel Istanbul Istanbul. Sins and Innocents has received the Sedat Simavi Literature Prize, and Stone and Shadow received the Orhan Kemal Novel Award. Stone and Shadow was nominated for the Premio Strega Europeo (2023) and the Dublin Literary Award (2024). His novels have been published in more than forty countries.

Sönmez was the inaugural lecturer of the Trinity Global Humanities Lecture Series (2024) at the University of Cambridge, where he presented the idea of "Homo Artifex", focusing on the meaning of art and its place in the history of human civilisation.