Erdoğan: A Graphic Biography: The Rise of Turkey’s Modern Autocrat

By Can Dündar and Anwar

• Erdoğan is our latest graphic history title, adding to a collection that includes books on the Vietnam war (Such a Lovely Little War), Fidel Castro (Castro), the Democratic Republic of Congo (Postcards from Congo), and Indigenous conflicts (The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book). The book is translated from the Turkish and is also available in German and French editions.

• Erdoğan (pronounced “Err-do-wan”) is one of the world’s most divisive and long-running leaders; he has served as either president or prime minister of Turkey since 2003, overseeing a country of 84 million sitting in the geopolitically volatile location at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. As a political up-and-comer, Erdoğan navigated Turkey’s political landscape by claiming to support progressive reforms, though once in power, he adopted an authoritarian stance by jailing opponents who speak out against him, quashing the rights of LGBTQ people and others, waging a war against the country’s Kurdish minority, and maintaining a working relationship with Putin despite the invasion of Ukraine.

• The book explores the origin story of Erdoğan, as a young Muslim man who dreamt of becoming a soccer player, to his political ambitions that included the founding of the ruling Justice and Development Party (also known as the AKP) in 2001. It provides a critical understanding of Erdoğan’s rise to power and his seemingly contradictory M.O. in which his proclamations of so-called economic and social reforms disguise his totalitarian instincts to quash those who dare to disagree with him.

• Author Can Dündar is a Turkish journalist and the former editor in chief of the Istanbul newspaper Cumhuriyet. In 2015, he was arrested and imprisoned on terrorism and espionage charges when his newspaper published photos of Turkey’s state intelligence sending weapons to ISIS in Syria. He was released from prison after 90 days and moved to Berlin in 2016 to escape further persecution, but not before being the subject of an assassination attempt in Istanbul, where an assailant fired two shots at him in front of a courthouse before being stopped by Dundar’s wife and a member of parliament. In 2020, he was sentenced in absentia to 27 years in prison for espionage and aiding an armed terrorist organization; Germany has said it will not extradite Dundar to Turkey as it views the trial and verdict as politically motivated.

• Dundar was the 2016 recipient of the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, an American non-profit; following the award ceremony in New York, he was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour for CNN, which is available for viewing at: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/11/23/turkey-intv-amanpour-can-dundar.cnn 

• Currently he is a contributing writer to the Washington Post, and is editor in chief of a Berlin-based web radio station run by the nonprofit newsroom run by the organization called COLLECTIV, which also published the original German and Turkish editions of this book.

• Illustrator Anwar is an Egyptian-Somalian comic artist and political cartoonist. He was among the new wave of young political cartoonists who emerged in Egypt in the final years of former dictator Mubarak. After the retraction of political reforms in Egypt in 2011, Anwar was arrested in 2019 and deported. He now lives in Berlin.

·  Based on the advice of the author and translator, we not using the widely accepted new spelling of Turkey as “Türkiye,” as this change was instigated by Erdoğan himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781551529226

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