The book features 16 writers from Turkey and around the world, alongside Hrant Dink himself, exploring how the values he championed and that are represented at the 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory have resonated across different geographies.
Through texts that engage in dialogue with Hrant Dink's own writing and draw on experiences spanning South Africa, the Americas, and Europe, the 23.5 book shares, through inspiring stories, how the struggles for truth, confrontation, and justice have taken shape across different social contexts. It shows how these experiences are part of the same history and how they are interwoven, and while examining different forms of remembering the past, it offers hopeful paths toward building the future together. The book aims to serve as an essential resource for all those who think about and are curious about these themes.
Organized around five core themes, the book invites readers to reflect on these values. In the Memory section, Deborah Valoma, Edhem Eldem, and Arus Yumul explore the relationship between archives, documents, and counter-narratives and their connections to memory and family histories. In the Truth section, Gabriele Schwab, Marianne Hirsch, and Bonita Bennett open a space for dialogue on the relationship between truth and confronting the past, from intergenerational trauma to the traces of Apartheid, while Arlene Voski Avakian and Ferhat Kentel draw on personal stories across different times and places to examine nationalism, gender, and urban memory. In the Confrontation section, Albie Sachs, Ayşe Kadıoğlu, and Étienne Balibar focus on different forms of remembrance and confronting the past, examining the concepts of violence, democracy, and justice through the experiences of different geographies. In the Action section, Takuhi Tovmasyan and Aylin Vartanyan Dilaver convey the transformative power of proper mourning and of practices of commemoration. In the Hope section, Ayşe Gül Altınay and Rakel Dink seek a foundation that makes it possible to collectively build and imagine the future together.
The 23.5 book is available from the 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory and the Hrant Dink Foundation, as well as from bookstores and online retail platforms.
Wishing you rewarding reading, for remembering and rethinking.
The 23.5 Book Is Now Published
The 23.5 book, published by the 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory, founded in 2019 at the site where Hrant Dink was assassinated on January 19, 2007, is now available in Turkish and English. Shaped around the themes of Memory, Truth, Confrontation, Action, and Hope, 23.5 invites us to think together about a future in which coexistence is possible.
