Ayşegül Savaş
“For me, reading and writing are ways of having a home—sheltering in the rules and landscape of a particular fiction. Literature is driven by an essential homelessness: all writers and readers are in search of places to inhabit for short periods of time, before moving on to the next lodging.”
“Utterly enchanting… Even the most humdrum events resonate with importance when viewed through Savas’s meticulous and layered prose and plotting. Her storytelling is subtle but deliberate…The ordinary moments contain multitudes, the novel seems to say … Savas has invited us to praise the unremarkable grace of Asya and Manu’s lives, and in the process, to pause and appreciate the beautiful textures of our own.”
“It’s a masterpiece.”
“An erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love… Don’t be deceived by Savaş’s cool, matter-of-fact tone – beneath it lie layers of wisdom, delicacy and subtlety... [she] has created something remarkable.”
“As a personal chronicle, it’s arresting and deep, and makes for a rewarding entry into the growing pantheon of postpartum literature.”
“In the middle ages, human skin was seen as a blanket stretched to cover a secret, inner life, writes Ayşegül Savaş. Reading White on White for me is like an outer skin which you open layer by layer as you read; gentle, mysterious and profound.”
“Despite the thriller-ish underpinning of the novel and the propulsive unfolding of the relationship at the book’s heart, Savaş’s graceful and intellectual prose is the star of the show here. It makes air-light what might otherwise be a novel ponderous with weighty questions: What is the nature of art? Does it reveal or conceal? What is the nature of human connection? . . . . Like a prism, this novel brilliantly illuminates the human spectrum of connection and longing.”
“An elegiac rumination on the nature of recollection and identity.”
“The dislocations of place, identity, time, and truth eddy through Savaş’s elegant debut. . . in spare yet evocative prose, Savaş’s moving coming-of-age novel offers a rich exploration of intimacy, loneliness, and the endless fluidity of historical, cultural, and personal narrative.”
Ayşegül Savaş is a Turkish author living in Paris. She author of the novels The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, 2024), a New York Times Editors Choice, White on White (Riverhead, 2021), and Walking on the Ceiling (Riverhead, 2019), and the nonfiction book The Wilderness (Transit Books, 2024). Her next book is the story collection, Long Distance, to be published by Bloomsbury in July 2025. Her work has been translated into seven languages and her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, the Yale Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere.
In a recent interview in The New Yorker about her story Freedom to Move, Savaş was asked how she knows a simple premise can become a story: “When I’m considering whether a particular setup has the makings of a short story, I often think of these lines from Walter Benjamin: “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” Benjamin’s words have guided me for years, even if I still find them quite mysterious. I interpret them to mean that a story must be told from the point of view of its ending.”
Savaş attended Middlebury College in Vermont, and received an MFA from the University of San Francisco.
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©Maks Ovsjanikov
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