New Book: From Life Itself Out April 28th, 2026
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country, comes an absorbing portrait of an Istanbul neighborhood reshaped by global forces.
Praise for From Life Itself
What Autocracy Feels Like: Hansen elegantly maps out the constellation of forces that brought Turkey to [an] unprecedented moment . . . Rich and complex . . . As [Hansen] shows in this beautifully observant book, the first steps to resisting the easy seductions of cynicism are to look, listen and try to understand.
Book of the Day: As the work of a journalist well acquainted with her adopted country, From Life Itself is lovingly written and well observed … Hansen brilliantly captures the little ways in which local prejudices begin to manifest: the complaints that Syrians smell of cooking oil; that they walk down the street all wrong; that they are a threat to Turkish women. Here it feels the book really gets into the grit of Karagümrük and the nativist politics recognisable far outside it.
Struggling to make sense of the sweeping changes that have transformed Turkey in the past decade under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a frenzy of construction, war in the Kurdish region, an influx of refugees and, especially, a sharp autocratic turn — Hansen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who has long lived in the country, homes in on residents in a single Istanbul neighborhood to create a richly textured human history.
About Suzy Hansen
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. Her second book, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan, is being published in April 2026. She has taught writing at Princeton University, New York University, and Bard College.
Notes on a Foreign Country
My first book Notes on a Foreign Country was a Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and the winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book on International Affairs.
