'Daily life is deeply important'

On her prose, and the choice to write in English rather than in her native Turkish

- Rutvik Bhandari

Both The Anthropologists and Long Distance are preoccupied with observation. What draws you to the idea of perception as both connection and distance?

I think, for many writers, one of the reasons they become writers in the first place is that they were observers as children. I also have this theory that many of us who were shy spent a lot of our childhood on the periphery, watching others closely, deeply curious about what people were doing, but not quite able to jump in and be part of the action. And of course, we spent a lot of that time reading. That is another way to become a writer, by being immersed in fictional landscapes to the point where you feel you're the hero yourself.