One neighborhood in Istanbul: a window on a city, country, region, and world in a state of upheaval.
Karagumruk, an Istanbul neighborhood once dominated by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for its cheap apartment blocks and petty thieves—and a massive influx of Syrian refugees. It’s here that Suzy Hansen went looking for the truth behind the headlines of the Turkish president Erdoğan’s authoritarian turn, a catastrophic regional war, and an accelerating geopolitical crisis. She discovered the neighborhood’s secrets and got to know its people: Ismail, the longtime muhtar, or neighborhood councilman; Huseyin, a loyalist for Erdoğan’s Islamic nationalist AK party; and Ebru, a real estate agent and mother with ambitions to unseat Ismail.
From Life Itself is the absorbing account of one neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change. But in a remarkable turn, Hansen connects the events unfolding in Karagumruk to the forces roiling Turkey, the Middle East, and the world. She asks: Was Turkey a harbinger of what we’d soon see in other countries, the resurgence of authoritarianism? Or do the lives of this neighborhood, and the transformations of Erdoğan’s Turkey, reveal a more complex story?
The author of the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country, Hansen explores Turkey’s place in the world as no other writer has. From Life Itself is a book for our time—a story for a world out of joint, and for all of us who feel the pressure of the disorienting global forces remaking our lives.
Suzy Hansen lived in Istanbul for more than a decade, where she was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the winner of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award. She has taught writing at Princeton University, New York University, and Bard College.
Hansen will be in conversation with Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy program and the director of its Turkey Project. She is also a senior associate fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). She is a former journalist. Prior to joining the foreign policy community in 2016 at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Aydıntaşbaş had a long career in journalism, focusing on Turkey’s domestic evolution and its foreign policy in an age of reshuffling and geopolitical competition. Aydıntaşbaş combined her tenure in Turkish media with overseas assignments and international commentary, straddling between Turkey and the United States. She was a Global Opinions columnist for The Washington Post up until 2024, trying to document both Turkey’s emergence as a regional power and the country’s democratic backsliding — contextualizing it within the overall the decline of the rules-based international order and the onset of great power competition. While living in Istanbul, she worked as a columnist at Turkey’s leading publications, including Milliyet and Cumhuriyet, and hosted the popular political debate show on CNN Turk. She continues to write and speak about Turkey, as well as the region all around Turkey, from Ukraine to the Caucasus and the Middle East.