At Substack’s Ottoman Encounters, historian Doga Ozturk reports:
A new English translation of an important late 19th century Ottoman novel is coming out soon from Edinburgh University Press: Samipaşazade Sezai’s Sergüzeşt: The Adventures of a Slave Girl, originally published in 1888, now translated by Burcu Karahan and Iclal Vanwesenbeeck.
The novel follows Dilber, a Circassian girl sold into an Istanbul household and enslaved as a cariye. It’s widely considered one of the first anti-slavery novels in Ottoman Turkish literature, and remarkably, it’s also a direct social critique of domestic slavery, written and published while the practice was still very much alive in Ottoman society.
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Altaic Storytelling 