Literair Café

Sibel waits at the Istanbul airport. Every day she misses her flight to Brussels. A sick pilot, an eccentric security guard, and a drug-sniffing dog accompany her on her journey. Within the walls of the airport, they search for ways to fill the black holes in their memory. Outside, a snowstorm rages. The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters. The Dutch alphabet has 26. That’s either three too few or three too many. Honingeter evokes a still atmosphere in which mother tongue and homeland collide. Turkish folklore and classical mythology merge into an unsettling, surreal tangle. In this novel, everyone is in transit.

In Honingeter, Tülin Erkan weaves her Belgian-Turkish roots with classical mythology and Turkish folklore to create something new. She skillfully strings together language and memory into a condensed whole.

Tülin Erkan (1988) is a writer, freelance editor, and writing instructor. She studied Language and Literature and Comparative Literature. Raised in a multilingual family, she was nurtured by a French-speaking mother and an English-speaking grandmother, while spending her summers with her father in Turkey. When people describe her as 'half,' she mostly feels doubled. In her debut novel Honingeter (Honey Eater), she explored the tension between mother tongue and homeland. Honingeter was nominated for the Bronzen Uil, the Boekenbon, and the Boon Literature Prize. She is currently working on a second novel.