True Story Festival returns to Coledale Community Hall this weekend!
Join us next on Sunday, 19 November when award-winning author Eda Gunaydin will talk about 'Belonging and Other Challenges' with Sarah Ayoub, from 11.15am-12.15pm.
Turkish-Australian writer Eda Gunaydin won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for her fiery debut collection of essays, Root and Branch, in which she combines personal memoir with her thoughts on class, capital, inherited trauma and what it means to belong.
Book your tickets here.
True Story Festival is brought to you by Life Sentences, the Illawarra Flame & the South Coast Writers Centre, with funding from Culture Bank Wollongong and support from Coledale RSL and Collins Booksellers Thirroul.
Ahead of the festival, meet the author in the article below, first published in our March 2023 edition.
Turkish-Australian essayist Eda Gunaydin, a University of Wollongong lecturer in international studies, has won the non-fiction prize at the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Non-Fiction for her debut book, Root & Branch.
“It’s pretty unexpected,” Eda said. “I was just at work and I got the call and I genuinely did feel for a moment that I had to sit down. It was very exciting.”
Eda said the prize is artistically rewarding and will smooth her path to publishing a second book. “Then, of course, there’s the money prize of $25,000, which allows me to do simple things like buy myself a new phone, get the tyre on my car replaced.”
Her award-winning collection, subtitled Essays on inheritance, published by UNSW Press, explores the legacies of migration, belonging and place.
“I feel a sense of responsibility, as a second-generation migrant, to try to come up with new ways of thinking about migration that don’t just conclude that we are forever doomed to be half people,” Eda said.
As a writer, Eda uses needle-sharp humour to dissect subjects that range from unhappiness, trauma and racism to the quirks of family, fast food and the concept of brunch in working-class life.
Her psychologist has noticed this, Eda said, laughing. “She once said to me, you use humour a lot as a coping mechanism. I said, ‘Well, it pays the bills’.
“This kind of subject matter could be a little bit dull if I didn’t find a way to lighten it. And that’s also how I approach my own life.
“You either laugh or cry.”
Of the 12 essays in her book, Eda’s own favourite is the longest. “It’s called Kalitsal, which is a Turkish word that means ‘inheritable, what can be inherited’. It’s probably one of the more optimistic essays in the book.
“It lays out a lot of the thinking that I have around the inheritances of migration, especially when your family relocates from a country where your economic prospects would’ve been a lot more limited …
“I’m the beneficiary of education and therefore class mobility. I carry around with me a lot of questions around path and privilege and around the value of hard work.
Eda doesn’t like the “bootstrapping narrative” of migration. “The essay meditates just about luck and fate, and more abstract things.”
Eda divides her time between UOW campuses, lecturing at Wollongong and at the Liverpool campus in south-west Sydney. “I’m also in the process of finishing my PhD at Sydney University.”
Her research involves gender, race and violence, and representations of the Middle East. The areas in Turkey and Syria devastated by February’s earthquakes were central to her studies, she said. “That region of the world has been historically neglected and is the victim of the weakness of the state in Turkey.”
Eda describes the fall-out as millions are displaced as “an unfolding tragedy”.
“It reminds me of the importance of the academic work that I’m doing.”
In her search for belonging, Eda has rejected nationalism and embraced family, friends and the Western Sydney community where she lives. “That feels much more meaningful to me than thinking about something as kind of large and abstract as Australia.”
She counts local writer Hayley Scrivenor, author of Dirt Town, as “a good friend” and took part in panels at the Wollongong Writers Festival before Covid put a stop to that event. This year, Eda will be appearing at True Story, the second festival of non-fiction at Coledale Community Hall, to be held from November 18-19.
Metaphorically having a foot in two countries is a topic many Wollongong residents, including the Turkish community, with migrants originally drawn to work at Port Kembla’s steelworks, will be familiar with.
Eda describes migration as a “form of trauma”.
“It’s a very immediate dislocation, interrupts so many aspects of your life and then introduces new questions about your roots and how to lay down new roots in a country that kind of is, but also isn’t your home.
“We’re kind of caught between two places. We’re never quite whole.
“The word that I use in a later essay is something called ‘gurbet’ and that kind of describes the condition of being in diaspora and in particular the kind of challenges [of being a migrant],” Eda said.
“Turkish poetry and music conceptualises gurbet as a kind of aching, longing, pain, and encapsulates all the suffering that comes alongside being away from your home.”
Her essay collection could, in fact, be summed up as a quest for wholeness.
“I think that’s exactly why I wrote the book. I don’t want people to conclude that they are half and half. I want them to feel whole.”
Visit Eda Gunaydin's website or connect via Twitter and Instagram
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