Sezer Ateş Ayvaz

Translation: Türkan Mamur; Editing: Nilay Erten

As Pen women writers committee Müge İplikçi, Nazan Haydari, Nalan Barbarosoğlu, Karin Karakaşlı, Özlem N. Yılmaz and Sezer Ateş Ayvaz, we planned a series of activities when we met in 2007 September. We needed to survey our women writers from literature to life to make their works and languages visible. This journey was toward reconstituting our social history with what women writers inspire and keeping our memories fresh. Women writers were in a life that requires struggle in many fronts, and in every era they tired to generate writing that complicates and puts their lives to a great deal of trouble. The masculine context wanted to render women writers “invisible” or “weak” in the canon of literature. We needed to point out both their lives and works.