INTERVIEW: Tuba Çandar on her biography of killed journalist Hrant Dink

The work of Armenian-origin Turkish journalistHrant Dink was as important as his death was tragic. As editor of the weekly newspaper Agos, Dink helped break new ground in the late 1990s and early 2000s before he was shot dead outside the Agos office by a young ultranationalist 10 years ago on Jan. 19.

Tuba Çandar's biography of Dink (reviewed in HDN here) gives a detailed, moving account of his life and work. Çandar spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about writing the book and Dink's legacy.

The book is written in a unique way, using the voices of Dink's friends, family and colleagues, as well as his own work, to tell the story of his life. Why did you choose this method?

Hrant Dink was my friend. When I first started writing his biography, I immediately knew it was not going to be a standard biography. The pain of losing him was still too fresh, too intense. I couldn't position myself as a "third-person omniscient" narrator to relate Hrant's life. Nor could I write as if I had witnessed his life first hand. So I decided there would be no single narrator, no overarching "I" in my book. Instead, beginning with the Dink family, I would tell Hrant's life story by chronologically bringing together the accounts of the witnesses of each period of his life: Their "voices" would construct the book.

I interviewed 125 people over a period of three-and-a-half years. While doing the writing  I took special care to preserve the unique tone of their narration. At one point I also decided to include Hrant's "voice" among all the other voices. There are over a thousand articles written by him in the Agos archive. I sorted out the autobiographical ones and edited them to fit the chronological and thematic flow of the biography....