Biography

Can Gürses was born in Istanbul, on the 6th of July, 1989. The day she learnt to talk, she begun telling tales; the day she learnt to write, she begun writing everything she wanted to tell. At the age of 7, she put pen to paper for her first work of art, The Solitude of Lady Safiye, which was a cinema script. This script was followed by theatrical plays, stories, and poems.

Can was graduated from Koç High School with her International Baccalaureate thesis on the relationship between irony-writer-society through Cervantes' Don Quijote, Oğuz Atay's Tutunamayanlar and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, for which she received full marks.

In the University of Kent, she studied Comparative Literature and Film. She was graduated with the second highest degree. The subject of her thesis was to argue the fictionality of reality through Krzysztof Kieslowski's following films: A Short Film About Love, Blue and The Double Life of Veronique.

In the University of Edinburgh, she completed her masters in the field of Comparative Literature. The subject of her graduation thesis was to disentangle the east-west and self-other fragmentation of identity through Amin Maalouf's Leo the African and Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle.

During her university days, she wrote her first novel, So You Have Lived The Most Beautiful Days Without Me along with the first three books of her children novel series, Thin and Tall.

In 2014, she gave lectures on Critical Thinking and English Literature in Bilgi University. She wrote in her coloumn, The Wardrobe of Literature, in the art, culture and politics magazine, Bir+Bir.

Following her first novel, So You Have Lived The Most Beautiful Days Without Me, published in 2014, her second novel, Broken White, was published in 2015. Her third novel The Lovers of Istanbul met its reader in 2017. The novel got awarded.

She has translated Ursula K. Le Guin's poetry book, Late in the Day, into Turkish in 2019. Concurrently, she has translated James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Turkish in 2017-9.

She wrote her first cinema script, The Land Beyond Time in 2019. Then in 2021, she wrote her second cinema script, Pastoral Symphony.

Her fourth novel, The Calendar of a Lifetime, got published in September 2022.

Novels

So You Have Lived
The Most Beautiful Days
Without Me

"Silence and silent are different things. Silence requires absence. To be silent, one should exist."

Broken White

"I, as dark as human's fate;

you, as white as God's autograph

Since our time is one

Let our bodies be apart."

The Lovers of Istanbul

"Love is political. Because someone waiting for another has not given up hope from this world. Waiting for someone is more utopic than socialism and even anarchism. The meeting of two lovers is the prospect of all utopias."

The Calender of a Lifetime

“Photographs rescue our memories from the past and make them belong to eternity. Neither past can return to us nor we can return back to past. Yet eternity is always with us. Eternity is the closest place to now. No ships or trains depart to eternity. To arrive at eternity, it is enough to look at a photograph."