I Was a Bestseller… Then I Lost It All Overnight

The day my books were pulled from shelves is burned into my memory.

It was July 2016, a hot, heavy night in Ankara. My publisher’s office had been raided. My books — every single one of them — were being pulled from shelves.

In that moment, I felt like someone had reached into my chest and erased years of my life with one sweep of the hand. Nine books. Years of work. Countless nights of writing until dawn. Gone, overnight.

It wasn’t just about politics. My books were never political — they were fantasy fiction, stories about creation, love, and the mysteries of existence. But that didn’t matter. My voice, my stories, my place in the world — all erased because of the house that had dared to publish in politics against the regime. Some of my colleagues went to prison. I was lucky to walk away. But in many ways, I carried a prison inside me.

A week later, I boarded a plane with barely a thousand dollars in my pocket. I didn’t know where I was going, not really. America first, then Canada. I learned how to fix broken phones, then how to carry tiles, then how to cut wood. My hands hardened into something they had never been before — calloused, blistered, stronger.

But inside, the writer in me stayed quiet. Silent, but not dead.

Years passed. My family finally joined me. I built a life in carpentry. I built homes, door frames, accent walls. But late at night, when the house was quiet, I still built worlds. The stories returned, one by one, knocking at the door of my heart.

The loudest among them was a story about Azâzil — not as an angel who fell, but as a jinn torn between light and darkness, asking the same questions I was asking in exile:

“What is the price of asking why?”

“Is it betrayal to seek meaning beyond command?”

“Why does the one who questions get cast out?

That story became my new novel, When the Devil Loves. I wrote it in English, my second language, with the same hands that once cut wood to feed my family.

The day my books were pulled from shelves was the day I thought I had lost my voice. But in truth, it was only the beginning of finding a voice that no one can silence — not even exile, not even fear.

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“This essay is part of my journey as the author of When the Devil Loves, now available here.”

“This story is also told in my short documentary Wood, Words, and the Man I Became. You can watch it here.”