Metamorphosis from Behind the Bars: Selahattin Demirtaş’s Leylan

This article examines the Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş’s prison novel Leylan (2019) in relation to the Turkish tradition of Künstlerroman, which dates back to the late nineteenth century. Through a reading of the figure of the writer manqué, it argues that Demirtaş occupies an unprecedented place in having staged the writer manqué as a subaltern autodidact rather than as a troubled intellectual, in uniting the political and the transcendental, and in affirming the potential hidden in incomplete texts and lives.