The Renovation is a heartbreaking portrait of one family caught in the tides of history, grappling with grief, exile, politics and the painful absurdity of love
Kenan Orhan
Kenan Orhan is a writer based in Kansas
His 2023 short story collection, I Am My Country, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was longlisted for the Story Prize. His fiction appears in The Atlantic, Paris Review, Common and elsewhere, and has been anthologised in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories.
His debut novel, The Renovation, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Kenan Orhan on The Renovation
The Renovation was born out of several obsessions, anxieties and angers all coming to a head at the same time. My frustration with Erdogan’s regime, the heartbreaking outcome of the 2023 elections, the political violence, human rights abuses, economic catastrophe, environmental and geological disasters all piling up – and then in parallel my longing to see the relatives in Turkey who I’d not been able to visit for years, and starting to notice my beloved grandmother’s lapses of memory, noticing too my own trouble holding onto images of the past. It seemed as if everything – my family, Istanbul, Turkey itself – was disintegrating, threatening to become unrecognisable and leave me hollow.
Read the full interview here.
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The Renovation is a heartbreaking portrait of one family caught in the tides of history, grappling with grief, exile, politics and the painful absurdity of love
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An extract from The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
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