Seray Şahiner

Seray Şahiner

Seray Şahiner is a Turkish writer born in 1984 in Bursa and raised in the Aksaray neighborhood of Istanbul. In 2007, she graduated from the Department of Journalism at the Faculty of Communication at Istanbul University. She began writing at a young age, with the support of her family. In high school, she published magazines and fanzines where she published her stories. From her first year of college, she worked as a journalist in a student magazine. In 2011, she received her master's degree from the Department of Cinematography at the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Marmara University, with a thesis on "The Wealth of Themes in Orhan Kemal's Screenplays in 1960s Turkish Film". She worked as a culture and arts journalist for several newspapers. This journalistic experience allowed her to master the language that people use in everyday life. She took guitar and painting classes for a long time, and was also a scout and a mountaineer. For a while she worked as a waitress, manual laborer, and machine operator in her mother's sewing workshop. She writes prose and engages in journalism. She has won several awards for her short stories and novels, and some of them have been staged as theater plays. Şahiner’s works focus on class issues and are written in a humorous style, with women in the spotlight.

Antabuse (Antabus)

Translation to Macedonian: Julija Petrovska

Antolog, Skopje, 2024

“Antabuse” tells the story of violence against women through the worldview of fifteen-year-old Leyla.

She is the only daughter in a working-class family that emigrated from Anatolia to Istanbul. And instead of school, she is sent to work in a garment factory to bring money home. Leyla begins to live her own tragic fate and in these pages she tells it directly, without embellishment or hiding anything. The harsh reality of Leyla, who lives to find a way to escape the situation she is in, will not leave you indifferent. The author uses such words that their power makes you feel the hurt of someone else’s pain.

The “Tatbikat Sahnesi Theater" performs the drama adapted from this novel and in 2016, the work received the "Cevat Fehmi Başkut" special award.