Ayşegül Savaş
Author of THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS and
THE WILDERNESS
Ayşegül Savaş explores—with a breathtaking exactitude—the ephemerality of youth and the travails of new motherhood within the pages of The Anthropologists and The Wilderness, her latest fiction and debut non-fiction.
Asya and Manu, the young couple at the centre of Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists, are carving out a life in a city that they have chosen for themselves—“We accepted, children that we were, that we would remain foreigners for the rest of our lives, wherever we lived, and we were delighted by the prospect. Back then, it didn’t seem to us that we’d ever need anyone else, in our small world that was also a universe.”
Image: Maks Ovsjanikov
An aspiring filmmaker, Asya sets out to capture life in a local park; Manu works for a nonprofit. With dreams of finding and establishing a home together, it is through their convivial rambles—observing neighbourhood characters, drinking with friends, viewing potential apartments—that the couple forge a life. Savaş’s third novel thrums with an underlying song of hope, encouraging readers to trace the pulse and celebrate the rhythms of even the most ordinary of people and days.
Where The Anthropologists focuses on intimacies of the everyday across a defined chapter in one couple’s life, The Wilderness (published by Transit Books as part of their Undelivered Lectures series) concentrates its gaze on the mythology surrounding the first forty days of motherhood. In this incredibly moving and necessary text, Savaş records the tenderness and anguish of matrescence while giving language to the triangulated bond of a grandmother, mother and newborn, the constant feeling that I may burst at the seams: the mechanics of a body—and life—rearranged.
Ayşegül Savaş is a writer of exquisite depths—how lucky we are as readers to receive two books by her this year. It was a joy to speak with Savaş about the writing of her latest work.
Girls on the Page
When did you first begin writing—what drew you in?
AYŞEGÜL SAVAŞ
I started writing my first short stories the year I graduated from university as an anthropology major. I was working a dreadful job in the Silicon Valley and I began writing during my lunch breaks, using notes from my fieldwork in anthropology (which I conducted with Kurdish women migrants) as the basis for my stories.
You’ve mentioned that the seed for The Anthropologists came from your short story, Future Selves. How did you decide on the novel’s form, and what did the transition from short story to novel look like?
The story is about a couple looking for an apartment to buy. Every place they visit offers a different vision of the future, of how they can live. I felt this was a very fun structure to write and wanted to continue exploring it. But beyond this technical framework, the story and the novel are very different in tone and this was one of the challenges for me in the early stages of writing the novel: I wanted to get away from the solemn tone of the story and allow for a more joyful way of storytelling. They were born out of very different curiosities.
On the topic of short stories, you’ve published many beautiful pieces—Canvas, Long Distance, Notions of the Sacred, and more recently, Freedom to Move. I’m curious about whether you write short fiction with the knowledge that each one could grow into a novel, or do you feel that certain stories can only exist as shorter pieces?
I think that short stories and novels have different seeds of inspiration. I often have to know the general arc of a story in order to write it; in fact, ideas for stories often present themselves as situations. Whereas the idea for a novel is more capacious, and more abstract. It is often just a landscape, or an atmosphere.
Early in The Anthropologists, Asya says that she believes making a documentary is both a process of empathy and an education: For now, I knew little beyond the fact that I wanted to film daily life, and to praise its unremarkable grace.
To praise its unremarkable grace—I loved that line and thought the same could be said about the act of writing. I’d love to hear about what your days were like while gathering inspiration for and working on The Anthropologists. What did that period look and feel like for you?
I wrote the first draft of The Anthropologists in the early months of the pandemic, longing intensely for the unremarkable routines of everyday life: going to cafés, to museums, meeting with friends. That time of isolation allowed me to see daily life with fresh eyes.
How do your characters form or present themselves while you’re exploring an idea for a story or novel—when do they become a person, rather than an idea?
During the long process of drafting and rewriting, I try to let go of the preconceived ideas I am imposing on a character and let them interact with the materials I have put on the page. Yet, I also think that my characters always remain mysterious to me, even once I’ve finished writing a book. I can’t say that I ever manage to see them very distinctly, or identify their innermost selves.
I’m interested to hear about how your surroundings influence your writing—do you find that you produce work differently depending on where you are, whether it’s a different room in the same house, or from city to city? Is there a particular location where you feel most like yourself as a writer?
Not a setting but rather time—days in a row when I can have half a day to read and write. After that, any quiet room will do, though I prefer my own desk.
“All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park.
I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges,
positioning them into a fluid conversation, I’d begun
to understand that there was, also, only one way to
live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of a day.”
—AYŞEGÜL SAVAŞ, The Anthropologists
There is a segment in The Wilderness where, post-partum and sleep-deprived, you tell your baby’s nanny that you are a writer, and edits are due for your novel. Were you working on The Anthropologists during this period?
Yes: I had to turn in the final manuscript some months after the baby was born.
What was that like, having one limb in a world of fiction while contending to a very raw and urgent present?
Not only did I have no idea how exhausted I would feel, but also how removed from the subject matter of the novel, about youth and drinking and smoking and having meandering conversations that lead nowhere. I felt a little bit resentful of these characters and their freedom; I felt that I was
writing about a lost world.
Both books are a snapshot of a specific moment in time, a certain and distinct period of life. Time feels suspended in The Wilderness—the reader feels the weight of a day, the baby crying for eight hours straight. You write, From my mother’s vantage point, it is a bracket in time, and it is normal. From where we stand, it extends infinitely in every direction.
Time feels a little more opulent in The Anthropologists: at this youthful juncture of life, it is at Asya and Manu’s disposal. Did you intend to explore this theme in both works, or was it something that surfaced incidentally?
I think about time as the essential framework of writing. Once I know what period a book will cover, I know how to move forward. Perhaps it is for this reason that my writing also deals with time, because it is built into its very core. The Wilderness is also quite explicitly on the topic of a particular duration: the forty-day period following birth when the new mother is said to be surrounded by jinn.
“Yet it seems that even if I were to step out, I would not emerge fully; that I will carry with me the dirt and leaves and boughs stuck to my body. This is the great change—that I will always contain the wild.”
—AYŞEGÜL SAVAŞ, The Wilderness
How do you feel now, with some distance between the present and the version of
yourself who experienced and wrote these words? What has been the greatest surprise
or revelation from writing (and now sharing) The Wilderness?
I feel a distinct distance between myself and the narrator of these words— I am surprised by the drama and upheaval I describe— though I know that I wrote them sincerely. It was such a porous, vulnerable time that I had no choice but to be honest and direct.
Perhaps the greatest revelation for me was that I managed to write this piece, humble as it is, in a time when I felt at the very edge of things. I was surprised by a reserve of energy and focus I did not know I possessed; I was half thinking I’d abandon the project out of sheer exhaustion. Nor did I foresee that the book would be about the wilderness—a space of contradictions, discomfort, possibility— and I still think that this is an interesting way of viewing not just the early postpartum but of the longer matrescence as well.
Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels Walking on the Ceiling, White on White, and
The Anthropologists as well as the non-fiction book The Wilderness. Her short stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, and a collection, Long Distance, will be published in July, 2025.
She lives in Paris.
To buy a copy of The Anthropologists and The Wilderness, consider supporting one of
Ayşegül’s favorite bookstores: McNally Jackson, City Lights, Pages of Hackney, John Sandoe,
and The Red Wheelbarrow.
Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz
© Girls on the Page 2025