Ozge Samanci on visualising Istanbul's sociopolitical currents

Ozge Samanci on her graphic novel “Evil Eyes Sea” (Uncivilized Books), a semi-autobiographical murder mystery centred on a group of students at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University in the 1990s

Listen to this episode

Introduce the central concept of the story to us.

This is a murder mystery. It's fiction but it's based on autobiographical detail. It's semi-autobiographical. The main idea of the book is political hopelessness, being a woman in Turkey in the mid-1990s; a search for power when you feel powerless. There are these two poor Boğaziçi University students, and while they are scuba diving at a diving club in the Bosphorus, they witness a freak accident. While dealing with their own trauma, they get entangled with a political scandal. The story describes the way they navigate those difficulties by inventing unexpected solutions.