Fiction writer and çevirmen working between Turkish and English — rediscovering in English the modernists of twentieth-century Turkish literature.
Colorado • İstanbul
The collected short stories of Memduh Şevket Esendal — diplomat, statesman, and quiet revolutionary of the Turkish short story — in English translation for the first time. Esendal turned away from melodrama toward the shopkeepers, clerks, wives, and neighbors of everyday Anatolia, finding in their small negotiations the comedy of the commonplace.
Translated, edited, and introduced by Etkin Hanson, with endnotes on Esendal's world and language. Forthcoming from Translation Attached, a press dedicated to bringing Turkish literature to English-reading audiences.
View in Translation Attached's 2026–27 catalogue →Etkin's translation practice is an advocacy project: she is currently working to bring several of the seminal Turkish short-story women writers of the mid-twentieth century into English, including Sevgi Soysal, Sevim Burak, and Selçuk Baran. She prioritizes style over strict literalism.
Translations have been placed or are being considered by top-tier journals such as Asymptote and The Paris Review. Etkin is also working on a compilation of Orhan Veli's short prose and translations of Memduh Şevket Esendal's novels.
She works closely with estate representatives — gaining the backing of heirs is vital and essential. Etkin believes in the primacy of publication rights and knows firsthand how important it is to respect an author's voice and originality.
Etkin is actively seeking out new short-story writers. Turkish authors interested in being translated into English are welcome to contact her with a sample of their work.
Compressed, interior, atmosphere-first. Stories set in Istanbul, New York, Arizona, Dublin, and Mexico City.
A linked collection of fourteen short-short stories — voice-driven miniatures that trade plot for pressure, in the lineage of Jean Rhys.
Short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Sonora Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, and Blackbird.
Etkin Hanson is a Turkish-American fiction writer and literary translator, and a professor of creative writing at the University of Colorado. Her work moves between two languages and two places — the American West and İstanbul — and her translation practice centers on Turkish modernists.
Her translation of Memduh Şevket Esendal's collected stories, Hash-Head and Other Tales (working title), is forthcoming from Translation Attached in Fall 2026 with the support of a grant from the Turkish Ministry of Culture. Translations of Sevim Burak and Selçuk Baran are underway, and her original fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Sonora Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, and Blackbird.
She is a regular participant in the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference and the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference.