ÇEVRE HIGHLIGHTS - 29. SAYI

43 OCAK 2026 Çevre College 23rd Book Fair – Yekta KOPAN Interview You have been producing work for many years in different fields such as writing, voice acting, and hosting. Which of these makes you feel most like yourself, or do they all complete your identity together? Of course, they all complete my identity together. These—and even more—are all the things I do. But it should also be said that some of these jobs, such as voice acting, hosting, or program production, are things I do to survive; in a sense, they are like a shirt I put on during the day and take off and hang up when I come home at night. Writing, however, is my body, my skin, my flesh. It is not possible for me to remove it from any part of my body. We learned that you graduated from the Department of Business Administration. How did your transition from this field to writing happen? Did you have an interest in writing and research during your student years as well? My journey of writing began at a much earlier age, even in primary school. Frommiddle school and high school onward, I was someone who worked much more decisively and much more disciplined in writing and had decided to produce in this field. In other words, I was fifteen or sixteen years old when I decided to become a writer. At the same time, I wanted to study at a university, because writing does not really provide a stable economic life. I have never regretted studying business; on the contrary, I have always been pleased with it. So I did not switch from one field to another. Writing was already something that existed in my life. Studying business became an educational process within this journey that opened different doors for me, taught me different disciplines, and helped me develop different narratives in my mind. In your stories, you often focus on the inner world, individual loneliness, and the sense of confinement experienced by urban people. Did these themes find you over time, or were they issues you wanted to address from the very beginning? When my first books were published, this was how critics or book promoters of that time defined and confined my work. Yes, in the stories and novels I write there is an inner world and a narrative, but they exist within a social plot. Therefore, after many years, I can comfortably say this: I won’t give individual story examples now, but in many of my stories I actually move toward the social, even the current and topical. At times I have written by pushing myself—sometimes knowingly pushing the limits, even though I am aware that we live in a geography where writing such things is difficult. So I have tried to establish a balance between the social and the reflection of the social in the inner world. Which artists in Turkish literature have particularly influenced you? Rather than being influenced by the entire body of work of a single writer, I am influenced by texts. A writer’s text A may not affect me that much, but I may study text B for days. Sometimes I even write a single paragraph from text B into my notebook. I was asked this so often that eventually I wrote my book Karbon Kopya to show how I could talk about all the texts and authors that influenced me within a literary work. In Karbon Kopya, I tried to pay tribute to all the writers who have influenced me—from Kafka to Borges, Dostoyevsky to Poe, Yusuf Atılgan to Orhan Kemal—by including homage sentences, mentioning their books, and placing those books within the book itself. Among the characters you have voiced, which one is your favorite or the most unforgettable for you? That is a very difficult question—and it is becoming even more difficult over time. I have done this actively for such a long period. Thousands of characters… There are many films, such as the very well-known Ice Age series, the Cars series, Lightning, the Back to the Future series, Jim Carrey films, and many others. There are also films like Star Wars. Because of their resonance today, these are the works I enjoy. How do you see young people’s relationship with literature and storytelling? What is the clearest difference that sets them apart from previous generations, and what advice would you give to today’s youth? I can say this: their relationship with literature is poor—very poor. Reading is related to storytelling. It is related to understanding life. A person who does not read, especially one who does not read literature, cannot do this. This is the most dramatic issue of today. It is not about whether you personally have or do not have a relationship with literature. The problem is that you cannot tell stories. Tomorrow, when you become a doctor, an engineer, a software specialist, a biomolecular scientist—in short, in all professions outside of literature—when you become a CEO or a businessperson, there is one essential weapon you will lack. Storytelling. Life is the art of storytelling. Living itself is the art of telling a story. We are the only living beings capable of storytelling.