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Books
In my memoirs I return to the life behind the columns. Alongside them are interviews and studies of the political questions that occupied me over the years. All books are in Turkish.
- Hikâyemin Sonu (2025) — My years writing for Zaman... my hopes and disappointments of the early 2000s... the notes I kept in prison in Silivri... my last months together with Fatma... In this second book of my memoirs I reconsider the choices whose consequences reached as far as my family life.
- Bir Hikâyem Var (2024) — This book covers my memories from my childhood in Istanbul and Ayvalık to my revolutionary youth, from taking refuge in Sweden and earning my doctorate there to my return home and my years as a newspaper columnist. In telling how my ideas changed over time, and under which influences, I look at the place Fatma, my family and my friends have had in my life.
- Türkiye’nin Tanıkları: İçeriden Bakanlar (2003) — Interviews I conducted during my years at Cumhuriyet, Sabah and Milliyet (1982-2001) with the politicians, thinkers and scholars who shaped intellectual life in Turkey, a range running from Sabri Ülgener and Şerif Mardin to Ergun Özbudun and Ersin Kalaycıoğlu.
- Türkiye’nin Tanıkları: Dışarıdan Bakanlar (2002) — In this book I gathered, under the heading “Türkiye’nin Tanıkları” (Turkey’s Witnesses), the interviews I conducted during my years at Cumhuriyet, Sabah and Milliyet (1982-2001) with world-renowned statesmen, social scientists and journalists who came to Turkey on various occasions.
- 2020 Yılında Türkiye (1991) — Based on interviews with people who shaped the country’s intellectual and political life, this study set out to shed light on how Turkey’s elites saw its relatively long-term (thirty-year) future: in a sense, on their “psychology”. In this book I interpreted the results of my research.
- DSP-SHP: Nerede Birleşiyor, Nerede Ayrılıyorlar? (1986) — This study, carried out together with Seyfettin Gürsel, set out to shed light on where the two parties claiming to be on the left in the 1980s converged and where they parted ways, by comparing their programmes and interviewing their leaders. (At the time the DSP’s leader was Rahşan Ecevit, but we spoke with her husband, who was then banned from politics.)
- Piyasa Ekonomisi ve Demokrasi: Yeni Sol’un İktisadi Görüşlerinin Eleştirisi (1985) — A translated book. The Turkish edition of Assar Lindbeck’s The Political Economy of the New Left (1971), a critique of the New Left’s economic views by the Swedish economist, published by Birey ve Toplum Yayınları as the first title in its Sol’da Tartışmalar (Debates on the Left) series.
- Turkar i Stockholm: en studie av invandrare, politik och samhälle (1980) — My doctoral thesis at Stockholm University (1974-1980), in Sweden, where I had gone as a political refugee. Translated from the English original and published in Swedish, it was based on research into the political values and behaviour of the immigrants from Turkey living in Stockholm at the time. The book closed with a summary in Turkish and English.