Jailed Kurdish leader becomes literary star behind bars

He may be languishing in jail but with his books flying off the shelves, Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas has joined an illustrious line of Turkish prison writers.

A former presidential candidate and persistent thorn in the side of Turkey's current leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Demirtas has spent more than three years in jail and faces up to 142 years more if convicted of ties to Kurdish militants, which he denies.

"I am engaged in a major battle of wills because I am a political prisoner and this is motivating me to expose my creativity," Demirtas said in written responses sent to AFP through his lawyers from his cell in western Edirne city.

Despite the possible sentence hanging over him he has found some consolation in his ever-growing number of readers as sales of his books, written in Turkish, reach into the hundreds of thousands.

His first book, Seher (Dawn), was published in 2017 -- a collection of short stories that contain glimpses into daily lives of ordinary people including women characters whose voices often go unheard.

It has turned into a runaway success, translated into 16 languages with 240,000 copies printed. Demirtas has followed up with another short story collection "Devran", and now a full novel, "Leylan."
"There is nothing here but four walls and a door. We spend almost all our time in a small cell... everything is directed towards weakening the human will and wrecking one's personality."
There was controversy in January over the staging of Demirtas's second book "Devran", with Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu saying: "They cannot clean the blood from their hands with theatre plays."
Demirtas told AFP he could not take Soylu seriously as "a minister in one of the most cruel and unlawful governments in Turkey's political history."
A book reader in Ankara, Cahit Segmen, said: "I bought one of his books both to know him closer and also to see his literary side. I also find him politically close to my beliefs and so I want to support him."