Brief Introduction to the Life-Imprisoned Kurdish Literature

I will briefly introduce the case of Kurdish literature sentenced to life imprisonment. Using the criterion of having at least one published work, there are around 250 life-imprisoned writers from five different generations who were born between the years 1950 to 1999. Most of them are still in prison but some have been released after completing 30 years of imprisonment, like the panelists of this session.

The analysis of the works belonging to this literature sheds light on the different aspects of the daily life of the Kurdish and Turkish people. However, prior to this analysis, the very emergence of this literature says more about how to deal with the damage to collective and individual memories, as well as to the links and relationships between generations. In other words, the emergence of these generations of writers and their extensive coverage points to the frequency of life sentence and its equivalents, and highlights that mass incarceration functions as a generation-cide.