Sami Kent
@SamiKent
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Journalist & Radio Producer in London + Istanbul In print, my first book, The Endless Country, out 27th June In audio, now on Today in Focus for @guardian
Joined April 2012
To condense a dream into a tweet: my book, The Endless Country, is out in June 2024. A personal history of Turkey’s first 100 years - you can pre-order it now. Yikes. https://t.co/W6ZXjAGvw7
panmacmillan.com
Find out more about The Endless Country by Sami Kent
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Yikes! Thanks judges - see you all in November!
@Shotsblog @DMan1504 @thebooktrailer @RobertsonImogen @AspectsHistory @waltscottprize @thebookseller @northodoxpress @adberginwriter @RachLouDriscoll @harvillbooks @BlackSpringUK @cathrynkemp @carmellalowkis @MushensEnt @DoubledayUK @rosamundmtaylor @LucyLethbridge @DrFrancisYoung @TheHistoryPress @KateHordern The Endless Country: Sami Kent This history of the first hundred years of the Republic of Turkey is told from the perspective of the author’s family. A vivid, colourful and often moving account of a tumultuous period in Turkey’s history #HWACrowns25 10/27
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What an unexpected midweek treat to see The Endless Country nominated by @HistoriaHWA. Thank you so much to the judges!
@rjblackmore1 @JulietPickering @dialoguepub @RachLouDriscoll @harvillbooks @AEGoldin @PushkinPress @BlackSpringUK @cathrynkemp @carmellalowkis @MushensEnt @DoubledayUK @JoannaMAuthor @FigTreePenguin @ktgreenst @picadorbooks @LucyLethbridge @DrFrancisYoung @rosamundmtaylor @TheHistoryPress @KateHordern @4thEstateBooks @LucyHH The Endless Country:Sami Kent This history of the first hundred years of the Republic of Turkey is told from the perspective of the author’s family. A vivid, colourful and often moving account of a tumultuous period in Turkey’s history #HWACrowns25 17/
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The great Today In Focus team of @helenpidd @samikent and Alex Atack made an episode about Max and did him proud. You can listen to it here: https://t.co/MQEuqcym3D
theguardian.com
Guardian journalist Archie Bland describes the day his seven-week-old son stopped breathing, and the life he has led in the two years since
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You wouldn’t know - if you didn’t pay attention to how authoritarian countries actually work - the shades and textures of them, how they can move into darker places, become evermore brazen. Basically, how they can break the heart again and again and again.
The mayor of Istanbul and President Erdogan’s most prominent rival has been taken into custody.
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There’s many other things in this piece I disagree with, but that I understand is how literary criticism goes. But to misquote a text - and then seemingly refuse to correct it - well that is a little harder to accept.
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Besides, of course, the wider point: a misquote like this is just sloppy and poor practice - at best - and we’d all hope for better in our book reviews, not least in the TLS
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It might seem trivial, but to me it’s really not. It’s not the truth of the stories didn’t matter because Turkey was some far-flung place of little importance; it’s that we chose to believe them because we loved our baba, and we loved his stories too.
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What I actually wrote was quite different. "In a sense, it didn't matter. This was the character arc we moulded for him and we loved him for it."
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As you can see, that quote is more or less concocted, by picking two different phrases, half a page apart, reversing their order, and inexplicably making it appear that they were in the same sentence.
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Particularly when it’s about something so personal: about my relationship to my baba and the country we both cherish. I did not - and would never write - ‘it was another world…it didn’t matter’ about the stories my baba told me about Turkey when I was young.
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It’s really disappointing to be misquoted in this recent @TheTLS review - and then ignored by the critic @alevadil after I pointed it out privately. https://t.co/uLMmEoK12C
the-tls.com
In 2016 a poster advertisement for the Brexit Leave campaign informed Britons that there were 76 million Turks and showed their muddy footprints marching
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Cumhuriyet Bayramı kutlu olsun - today Turkey turns 101, to millions of flags, balloons and the old playbook of patriotic songs. To learn a little more about its first 100 years, you can order The Endless Country, my personal history of Turkey, and memories of celebrations past
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Found this moving to watch, these last moments of Açık Radyo on air, a station I've listened to so much over the years, even played to my boy so he hears more Turkish at home. Good radio is rare, even more so in Turkey - what a shame to shut it down. But I'm sure it's not the end
"Açık Radyo kâinatın tüm seslerine, renklerine ve titreşimlerine açık kalacaktır."
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This week the UK agreed to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. So it’s a good time listen back to this journey of a 2022 Today in Focus ep made w/ @safimichael @SamiKent @philippesands @phil_maynard about the history of this long-running legal battle:
theguardian.com
Over 50 years after they were forcibly removed from their homes, the former residents of Britain’s last colony in Africa are challenging the UK’s claim to the archipelago. Lawyer Philippe Sands is...
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Writing a book, watching it go out into the world, it can be pretty lonely. So what a joy to receive a postcard - an actual printed thing - from a stranger who enjoyed it. Thank you T!
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It was a pleasure to work on this with @estheraddley, @helenpidd and @elidblock. And to meet Khalil in the end too What a story to be able to tell - about migration, its sometimes tragic ends as well as its happier beginnings, and ultimately about the power of stories themselves
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‘Curious, emotional and partly unsettling’, but most importantly ‘recommended’. Thanks Merih!
Just finished reading Endless Country by @SamiKent. It’s been a curious, emotional and partly unsettling trip down memory lane, an episodic depiction of the history of “modern” Turkey that is. Refreshes one’s memory! Recommended.
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And one for me: https://t.co/flp5VWMmbg I talk to Anna-Joy Rickard about The Endless Country, my book on the history of Turkey, for the latest episode of the Great British Foreign Affairs Podcast
open.spotify.com
The Great British Foreign Affairs Podcast · Episode
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One podcast for you: https://t.co/94rkaopo2W
@tomphillipsin speaks to @helenpidd about Venezuela and the president who refuses to concede defeat. With @RuthAbrahams5 and @RudiZygadlo. And, if we can say so ourselves, we think it's pretty good
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