Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.
Grant Robert Gee is a British film maker, photographer and cinematographer. He is most noted for his 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy about the British alternative rock group Radiohead.
Sylvia Alice Earle is an American marine biologist, oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer. She has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence since 1998. Earle was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and was named by Time Magazine as its first Hero for the Planet in 1998. She is also part of the group Ocean Elders, which is dedicated to protecting the ocean and its wildlife. In 2021, Earle gained a large amount of publicity when she featured in the Netflix Original documentary, Seaspiracy, by British filmmaker Ali Tabrizi.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the CIA, under the direct orders of the then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
Steven Anthony Stefanowicz was involved, as a private contractor for CACI International, in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
William Irwin Thompson was an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He described his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He was the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which proposed the study and realization of a new planetary culture.
Islamic literature is literature written by Muslim people, influenced by an Islamic cultural perspective, or literature that portrays Islam. It can be written in any language and portray any country or region. It includes many literary forms including adabs, a non-fiction form of Islamic advice literature, and various fictional literary genres.
Article 301 is an article of the Turkish Penal Code making it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, Turkish government institutions, or Turkish national heroes such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It took effect on June 1, 2005, and was introduced as part of a package of penal law reform in the process preceding the opening of negotiations for Turkish membership of the European Union (EU), in order to bring Turkey up to Union standards. The original version of the article made it a crime to "insult Turkishness"; on April 30, 2008, the article was amended to change "Turkishness" into "the Turkish nation". Since this article became law, charges have been brought in more than 60 cases, some of which are high-profile. The Great Jurists Union headed by Kemal Kerinçsiz, a Turkish lawyer, is "behind nearly all of Article 301 trials". Kerinçsiz himself is responsible for forty of the trials, including the high-profile ones.
Samuel Provance is a former U.S. Army military intelligence sergeant, known for disobeying an order from his commanders in the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion by discussing with the media his experiences at the Abu Ghraib Prison, where he was assigned from September 2003 to February 2004. After being disciplined for his actions, he eventually brought his case to the United States Government in February 2006, resulting in a Congressional subpoena of the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The main points of his testimony are that military intelligence soldiers and contracted civilian interrogators had abused detainees, that they directed the military police to abuse detainees, the extent of this knowledge at the prison, and the subsequent cover-up of these practices when investigated.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015) was a British literary award. It was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support of Arts Council England. Beginning in 2011 the administration of the prize was taken over by BookTrust, but retaining the "Independent" in the name. In 2015, the award was disbanded in a "reconfiguration" in which it was merged with the Man Booker International Prize.
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is a 2006 Turkish action film directed by Serdar Akar and starring Necati Şaşmaz, Billy Zane and Ghassan Massoud. The story concerns a Turkish commando team which goes to Iraq to track down the US military commander responsible for the Hood event.
Perihan Mağden is a Turkish writer. She was a columnist for the newspaper Taraf. She was tried and acquitted for calling for opening the possibility of conscientious objection to mandatory military service in Turkey.
Jen Banbury is an American playwright, author and journalist. She studied at Yale University and was a member of Manuscript Society. After publishing plays and a novel, she turned to reporting in 2003, becoming a freelancer who has reported for NPR, Salon.com, and other organizations. In 2003 and 2004, she reported from Baghdad for Salon. On March 3, 2004, Salon published her story "Guantanamo on Steroids", one of the earliest articles about U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It was listed as one of the "Best of Salon" for 2003. Her Salon reporting was cited and her story "Night Raid in Baghdad" was reprinted in Boots on the Ground: Stories of American Soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan by Clint Willis.
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Center for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German Critique.
Istanbul: Memories and the City is a largely autobiographical memoir by Orhan Pamuk that is deeply melancholic. It talks about the vast cultural change that has rocked Turkey – the unending battle between the modern and the receding past. It is also a eulogy to the lost joint family tradition. Most of all, it is a book about Bosphorus and Istanbul's history with the strait. It was translated into English by Maureen Freely in 2005.
Paul Bernard Holdengräber is an American interviewer, curator and writer. He was Director of New York Public Library (NYPL)'s Public Programming, most known for organizing literary conversations for the NYPL's public program series, LIVE from the NYPL, which he founded. Since February 2012, he has hosted The Paul Holdengräber Show on the Intelligent Channel on YouTube. He is founding Executive Director of The Onassis Foundation LA (OLA), a “center of dialogue” in Los Angeles, beginning in 2019.
Michael D. Fay is a former United States Marine Corps combat artist. Before his retirement from the Corps, he was a war artist serving in Iraq. He was deployed as an artist-correspondent embedded with US troops in Afghanistan. He resides in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
On Ugliness is a 2007 essay by Italian author Umberto Eco, originally published by Bompiani in 2007. The book is a continuation of Eco's 2004 aesthetic work On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea. Like the previous work, this essay combines literary excerpts and illustrations of artworks from ancient times to the present to define the concept of what it means to be ugly. "Ugliness is more fun than beauty", said Eco himself and some other reviews.
