Case Background
Ayse Nur Zarakolu was born in Antakya in 1946, where she studied sociology before working for a trade union. She went on to join the Varlik publishing company in 1968, and in 1977 she founded the Belge Publishing House with her husband Ragip Zarakolu, a writer and human rights activist who has also faced repeated harassment from the Turkish state. Throughout her career, Zarakolu published many books of history, politics, and poetry that the Turkish government deemed offensive. As a result, she faced numerous arrests, court hearings, fines, denials of travel, the banning of the books she published, and other harassment from the state.
She was first detained in 1982, and then repeatedly over the next two decades as a result of Türkiye’s draconian anti-terrorism laws that restrict freedom of speech. Among her most notable arrests was when she published a Kurdish book of poetry in the early 1990s, landing her with charges of spreading separatist propaganda. She was also detained for publishing several books acknowledging the Armenian genocide at the hands of Turkish authorities, a narrative that the Turkish government virulently denies. In 1997 she was arrested and put on trial for publishing a collection of articles by German journalist Lissy Schmidt, who had been killed while reporting in the Kurdish region of Iraq – that year, she received the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. She died of cancer in January 2002.