Prairie Lights

Director of Translation Programs Aron Aji will read from his new translation of the dark and exciting novel Lojman, by Ebru Ojen. “A parable of violence—of state mandation, of mothering alone, of being mothered, of the vastness of nature—that shocks the system like stepping out the front door into a snowstorm. What does it mean to be a woman, and to be mothered by women, who have suffered under such alienation? Ebru Ojen captures the experience of immense pain with dark fervor and deft lyricism.”—Makenna Goodman

Aron Aji is the President of The American Literary Translators Association. He has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, Ferit Edgü and other Turkish writers. His translations of Bilge Karasu: Death in Troy; The Garden of Departed Cats won the 2004 National Translation Award; and A Long Day’s Evening won an NEA Literature Fellowship, and was short-listed for the 2013 PEN Translation Prize. He is Director of Translation Programs at the University of Iowa.

Ebru Ojen was born in 1981 to Kurdish parents in Malatya.  She has published three novels, and is one of the most important emerging female voices in Turkish literature.