Maureen Deidre Freely FRSL (born July 1952) is an American novelist, professor, and translator. She has worked on the Warwick Writing Programme, University of Warwick, since 1996.[1]
Maureen Freely | |
---|---|
Born | July 1952 (age 71–72) Neptune, New Jersey, U.S. |
Occupation | Novelist, professor, translator, and journalist |
Alma mater | Harvard College |
Spouse | Paul Spike(1976-1989)Frank Longstreth (2009-2012) |
Children | 4 children 2 stepchildren |
Parents | John Freely (father) |
Biography
Born in Neptune, New Jersey,[2] she is the daughter of author John Freely.[3][4] She has a sister, Eileen, and a brother, Brendan.[5][6] Maureen Freely grew up in Turkey. She graduated from Harvard College. She now lives in England.
She is the mother of four children and two step-children. Her first husband was Paul Spike, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Her second husband was Frank Longstreth, with whom she had two daughters. Freely is a fourth-generation atheist.[7][8]
Work
Freely lectures at the University of Warwick[9] and is an occasional contributor to The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. From 2014 to 2021, she served as President/Chair of English PEN, the founding centre of PEN International.[10][11][12] She was later made an Honorary Vice President.
Four of her eight novels – The Life of the Party (1986), Enlightenment (2008), Sailing Through Byzantium (2013), and My Blue Peninsula (2023) – are set in Turkey. She is also the author of The Other Rebecca (2000), a contemporary version of Daphne du Maurier's classic 1938 novel Rebecca.[13] Freely is an occasional contributor to Cornucopia, a magazine about Turkey.
She is best known as the Turkish-into-English translator of Orhan Pamuk's recent novels. She worked closely with Pamuk on these translations, because they often serve as the basis when his work is translated into other languages.[13] They were both educated simultaneously at Robert College in Istanbul,[14] although they did not know each other at the time. Marie Arana praised Freely's translations of Pamuk works like Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, and The Museum of Innocence as "vibrant and nimble" translations.[15]
Freely translated and wrote an introduction to Fethiye Çetin's 2008 memoir, My Grandmother.[16] She went on to translate its sequel, The Grandchildren, as well as Tuba Çandar's biography of the assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Freely has also translated or co-translated 20th century Turkish classics by such authors as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Sait Faik Abasıyanık, Sabahattin Ali,Suat Derviş, Sevgi Soysal, and Tezer Özlü.
Freely was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.[17]
Bibliography
Novels
- My Blue Peninsula (2023)
- Sailing Through Byzantium (2013)
- Enlightenment (2008)
- The Other Rebecca (2000)
- Mother's Helper (1982)
- The Stork Club (1995)
- What About Us (1996)
- The Parent Trap (2002)
- Under the Vulcania (1994)
- The Life of the Party (1986)
Translations
of Orhan Pamuk:
- The Black Book
- Snow
- Other Colors: Essays and a story
- Istanbul: Memories and the City
- The Museum of Innocence
of Fethiye Çetin:
- My Grandmother (2008)
- The Grandchildren (2014) (authored with Ayşe Gül Altınay)
- The Time Regulation Institute [1] (2014) (translated with Alexander Dawe)
- A Useless Man[1] (2014) (translated with Alexander Dawe)
of Sabahattin Ali:
- Madonna in a Fur Coat [18] (2016) (Translated with Alexander Dawe)
of Tuba Çandar:
- Hrant Dink : An Armenian Voice of the Voiceless in Turkey (2016)
of Suat Derviş:
- In the Shadow of the Yali (2021)
of Sevgi Soysal:
- Dawn (2022)
of Tezer Özlü:
- Cold Nights of Childhood (2023)
References
External links
- Rose Bialer, "An Interview with Maureen Freely", Asymptote.