First Light

Zafer Şenocak is a prolific Turkish-German author and public intellectual, who has published ten books of poetry, seven novels, five essay collections, and numerous articles over the past 40 years. Born in Ankara in 1961, he has lived in Germany since 1970 and in Berlin since 1989. He wrote exclusively in German early in his career, but he now frequently writes in Turkish. He has won several prestigious awards in Germany, and is a frequent contributor to nationwide German newspapers.

Translator Kristin Dickinson is Associate Professor of German Studies and affiliated faculty in the department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching focus on questions of migration, translation, multilingualism, and cross-cultural contact in and between German and Turkish literature. Her book Disorientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation (1811–1946) appeared in 2021 with Penn State University Press. She is also the co-curator of the photography exhibit “Visualizing Translation: Homeland and Heimat in Detroit and Dortmund,” and the co-creator of the public humanities project translatingmichigan.org.