Burhan Sönmez

Burhan Sönmez (born 1965) is a Kurdish human rights lawyer and novelist from Turkey. He is the President of PEN International, elected at the Centennial Congress in 2021. He is also Senior Member and a By-Fellow of Hughes Hall College, University of Cambridge.

Sönmez is the author of five novels. His first novel, North (Kuzey), was published in 2009 in Turkey. His second novel, Sins and Innocents (Masumlar), was published in 2011. His third novel, Istanbul Istanbul, was published in 2015. Labyrinth, his fourth novel, got published in 2018. His fifth novel is Stone and Shadow, published in 2021. He published Lovers of Franz K. in 2024 that is his first novel he wrote in his mother tongue Kurdish after writing five books in Turkish.

He received the "Disturbing the Peace" award given by Vaclav Havel Library Foundation in New York (2017). He was awarded the EBRD Literature Prize in London (2018) for his novel Istanbul Istanbul. Sins and Innocents has received the Sedat Simavi Literature Prize, and Stone and Shadow received the Orhan Kemal Novel Award. Stone and Shadow was shortlisted for the Premio Strega Europeo in Italy (2023) and it is currently on the long-list of Dublin Literary Award (2024). His novels have been published in more than forty countries.