Hasan Saraç

It’s been almost sixty years since I started reading books.

At the beginning there were novels laid down before me by my mother who was a high school history teacher. All those heavy books which I tried to read one after another in those hot summer days in Ankara… A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway. The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, Les Miserables by Hugo, and many more novels the names of which I cannot recall right now.

I also remember the books I “stole” from the shelves all around our one-storey home. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, the biography of Toulouse Lautrec and other fascinating books.

My father was a Physics Professor at the faculty of Natural Sciences. When he finished the work he brought home from the University, he would lie down on the couch in the living room and thumb through history journals and read biographies of Ottoman Sultans or Napoleon. Or the French editions of Agatha Christie mysteries. On the other hand, my deepest passion was the 10 volume series of The Pardaillan by Michel Zevacoin his library. I would read and reread the lines I had almost memorized and while I ran around breathless from Catherine de Medici and Fausta to the Huguenots and Henry II, I would ride on horseback in the streets of Paris which I had never seen and I would feel on my palate the tartness of the Bourgogne wines which I had never tasted.

My secret treasure was the small library of my elder brother who was at that time a student at the Faculty of Natural Sciences. My adventure took off with Jules Verne’s books and went until I finished all the published works of legendary science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Years went by. My curiosity about the obscurity of the future was transformed into an endless passion as I read the books of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke and Douglas Adams.
I was in my twenties when I first got to know Kurt Vonnegut Jr. And then came Paul Auster, Jerzy Kosinski, Franz Kafka, Ayn Rand, Irvin Yalom, Haruki Murakami, and many others.

Novels, short stories, biographies, history, psychology…

I got deeply attached to many writers whose books I had read with interest. I shared with them certain periods of my life. I tried to look at the world through their eyes, I felt a part of their magical world between the lines. I experienced the joy or the pain together with the characters they created.

And then came a day when something inside me quietly changed.

Now I wanted to write!

When I stood up from the reader’s chair with the desire to start writing, I dreamed of creating my own style from the magic potion which had been brewing for almost half a century.

In line with the initial concept I had in mind, I’ve been playing around with various projects involving fantastic and/or futuristic qualities which will bring together characters in more than one novel even though types and themes may be different.

I am hoping that our adventure will flourish and strengthen our relationship for many years to come.

Let the magic of books guide you on…

January 9th, 2009

Istanbul

Final Update: June 2019