In the spring term 2019 Nedim Gürsel will be our eleventh «Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor for World Literature» at the University of Bern. He teaches a weekly seminar on religion in contemporary literature.
Nedim Gürsel was born in Gaziantep (Turkey) in 1951. He studied comparative literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he also obtained his PhD. After the military coup in 1980, his books were banned in Turkey and he has been living in France ever since. Today, he teaches in Paris and works as the research director on Turkish Literature at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).
An award-winning, but also a persecuted author
For his first collection of stories Un long été à Istanbul (1976, «A Summer without End»), Gürsel was awarded the Prize of the Turkish Language Academy. Later, several novels followed, such as La première femme (1986, «The First Woman»), Les Turbans de Venise and Au pays des poissons captifs – Une enfance turque (2004, «In the country of captive fish – a Turkish childhood»). Because of his autobiographical novel Les filles d’Allah (2008, «The Daughters of Allah») the Turkish judiciary brought a criminal case against Gürsel for «defaming the religious values of the people», which ended in 2009 in his acquittal. His latest novel, Le fils du capitaine, was published in 2016. Nedim Gürsel’s texts have been awarded many prizes and been published in twelve different languages.
What role does religion play in modern literature?
Islam, the Prophet Mohammed and his role in contemporary literature are the focus of Gürsel’s seminar, entitled «Modernité et Tradition – La Religion dans la Littérature Contemporaine». The starting point will be his non-fiction book La Seconde Vie de Mahomet – Le Prophète dans la Littérature, published in summer 2018. The weekly seminar begins on February 20 at 2 pm at the University of Bern.
