The Interview : Kenan Orhan

Rachna Singh, editor of The Wise Owl, talks to Kenan Orhan, an award-winning writer based in Kansas. Kenan's 2023 short story collection, I Am My Country, was a finalist for the Penn/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was long-listed for the Story Prize. His fiction appears in The Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His debut novel, The Renovation, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize 2026.

Hi Kenan. Congratulations on being long-listed for the Booker Prize 2026. Thank you for taking time out to talk with The Wise Owl

RS: The Renovation opens with a startling and memorable image: a Turkish prison cell appearing where Dilara expected to find a newly renovated bathroom. How did this image first come to you, and what convinced you that it had the potential to sustain an entire novel?

KO: The image itself sort of fell into my lap. I start my fiction from voices that keep repeating a few lines over and over in my head. The first sentence of the novel, about builders installing a prison instead of a bathroom, was what Dilara kept repeating to me over and over. I couldn’t fall back asleep so I went and wrote the first page in the middle of the night. I prefer to have fun. As soon as writing starts to look like work to me I won’t go near it. I enjoy when these odd images or ideas strike because my process then is figuring out how to make it a moving exploration of life. I’m not trying to make the magic super believable itself, but the human experience of it must be emotionally convincing. I wouldn’t say this image of a portal in itself was enough to sustain a novel, or at least that wasn’t ever a question for me. It was a gateway into the larger through-lines, the portrayal of dementia, the loss of a homeland, the disintegration of memories—the prison cell, in a great irony, is a way to have fun while exploring unpleasant things.

RS: One of the most striking aspects of The Renovation is the way the surreal emerges so naturally from the ordinary details of everyday life. I'm curious about your creative process—how did you approach building a world in which a fantastical element like the prison cell feels both impossible and completely believable?

KO: My process is not bothering to explain the surreal too much. When you’re reading a very realist story and a character turns on the TV (a very mundane action) the author doesn’t explain the magic of television, the way electricity works behind the screen, the way information is sent hurtling through space. If you sort of just keep stomping past the strange, if your characters treat it a bit like turning on the television, the reader (if they are a generous reader) will have to accept it and move on as well, and then it becomes a fact of the world. The longer you pause to explain a bit of the surreal, the wider the gap out of which your reader my escape the fictive dream. In this way my process is in the tradition of the fairy tale or fable. Reality never breaks down in them because they create their own internal logic. I try to make sure my stories create their own logic but then they have to abide by their own rules. It’s been my experience that a reader will trust your bending of reality if the things they do recognize are convincing. It was very important to portray caring for an elderly parent in an empathetic way. If I could capture that in a way that resonates with a reader, they’ll trust the rest of the story now matter how absurd.

RS: Memory operates almost as a living character in the novel—unreliable, elusive, and yet insistently present. How did you think about memory as a narrative force, especially in relation to your portrayal of dementia, exile, and inherited histories?

KO: So much of the way we organize our own lives is through ordering and editing our memories, lining them up in a way that compliments our understanding of ourselves. As a species that is naturally narrative obsessed, the way we often think of the past, of our memories in narratively, linearly. That obsession is a common exploration in my work, the way we form our identities in a constant renovation of our pasts. This book is a look at what happens to us when the possibilities of our lives are curtailed by a loss of memories, either through dementia, or in the general passage of time eating away at them until they are riddled with holes like moth-eaten clothes. How do we shore up our ideas of the self as conflicting information presents itself? How do we repair the foundations of our identity when we are escaped into a new land, a new language? For some members of the diaspora, the homeland isn’t really a place anymore so much as it is the memories carried with them, and this collective act of remembering becomes the home—for Dilara, her home and homeland now are her and her father’s stunted memories of Istanbul. Her struggle is the excavation of the past, a sort of archaeology that makes her personal history an occupiable country. This affects us all—we all pine for a return to our youth, but for the exile, there becomes this place on a map that seems to promise an actual possibility of return. Dilara conflates the past and the map.

RS: Some of the novel's most powerful moments arise not from what is explained, but from what is left unsaid—through silences, gaps in memory, and things that remain just out of reach. As a writer, how do you decide what to reveal and what to withhold? Do you consciously leave space for readers to inhabit and interpret, or does that ambiguity emerge more intuitively during the writing process?

KO: Any space I leave for a reader is probably more intuitive, or at least it’s not something I’m aware of while writing, it probably happens most intentionally in the editing process. I’m not the best at it. Generally, I hammer home a point. In my work the silences are often where I use humor, albeit usually the characters are being a bit darkly humorous or surprisingly ironic. They provide opportunities for sharp turns in the narrative or in the stream of ideas flashing through the character’s mind. On the spectrum of writers who reveal a great deal with their silences, I’m afraid I’m on the end who don’t say much with their silence. I was never as good at it as authors like Annie Ernaux or Ernest Hemmingway. My characters are too loud, they can’t shut up, just like me, they keep talking and talking. But that too is a way to reveal and withhold I suppose. I create a gravitational center and then the characters talk and talk around it, chatting away, acting desperate or silly, arguing with friends and family, digging into their own psyches until there is a mass of language that all orbits the dense core that I’m trying to get at, a core that language is sometimes insufficient to label and so instead is used to describe its boundary—understanding a thing by understanding its edges.

RS: The Renovation is deeply attentive to sensory detail—the smell of simit, the dust of the Anatolian steppe, the sounds filtering through prison walls. How important is sensory memory to your creative process, and how do such details help you construct a sense of place, particularly one shaped by distance and longing?

KO: Distance and longing are naturally wrapped up in the senses. When I miss a place the first thing I do is compare it to the place I am currently inhabiting—what is the difference in weather, in sounds, in the taste of the foods? You compare as a way to state what you miss, or at least I do: the döner in Istanbul is better, my aunt makes tea just the right way, the Bosporus so glittering and buoyant is heaven compared to the landlocked sweep of Kansas. But I think we do this because the senses trigger this collapsing of time in us. You are walking your dog, say, and on the breeze, for just a moment, is a scent you recognize deep under a rock in your past, and suddenly you’re tumbling backward into your memories. You take a bite of the bakalava your grandmother has made for your birthday, and you pinch the clove between your teeth and the crunch is the same aggressive swell of flavor as the time you did the same on a sunnied patio overlooking the sea with all your relatives for company. The senses act like wormholes opening up in the strangest places, unpredictably becoming a gateway between the present and the past, but only briefly before they close up. A large part of this book was an attempt to capture that experience, that transcendence.

RS: Questions of home, belonging, and identity run through much of your work, but The Renovation approaches them in particularly unexpected and nuanced ways. Did writing this novel change or deepen your own understanding of what it means to belong to a place, a language, or a history?

KO: When I set out writing it, I had this idea of a homeland as a place. I think many people approach home and homeland as places but there is no one correct understanding of it. As I wrote, as I dug into my own experiences and the experiences of relatives, as I listened to my family talk about immigration, about longing, about missing family, as I and my family spent so many gatherings collectively remembering our trips to Istanbul or south along the Aegean to summer houses on the coast, or our relatives’ trips to visit us in America, my understanding of home shifted. It’s not a place for me anymore, it’s a people. Home is the people you share foundations of the self with. It could be people you’ve known your whole life, it could be the family you were born into, but it could also be the adoptive families we make as we grow and our friendships deepen. I think especially for immigrants, for their children, for the diaspora, for anyone straddling existences and identities, home is the people who walk that tightrope with you.

RS: Dilara's journey unfolds at the intersection of the personal and the political, where family history becomes inseparable from larger histories of displacement and power. How do you navigate the challenge of writing politically resonant fiction while remaining committed to the complexities of individual lives?

KO: I think for many people, the experience of existence is intrinsically tied to the politics surrounding them, and I wanted to capture this in a way that created the gravity of contemporary Turkish politics as a mass for the reader to take in just the same way people in Turkey must take it in: unavoidably. But I had hoped not to make only a manifesto. The point of political fiction is those human connections. What Jim Shepard calls the worm’s eye view is how I try to negotiate bringing the political in contact with the personal. You have to eventually focus on the human element, the immediate needs and challenges facing the characters. I’m not sure I have a good answer for this, because I am sure there are readers who think I’ve overexplained or overcontextualized, but Dilara’s story is a coming to terms with the politics that have wrecked her life. I wanted to include as much of the politics as I included of their wake. Maybe I’ve presented the political too overtly, but I think authoritarianism isn’t something you beat around the bush about, I don’t think it deserves some subtle treatment. But the characters do, they must feel the ramifications of the state’s actions and they must respond in emotionally impactful ways and there must be nuance in their decisions. In my mind successful political fiction isn’t so much about exploring the gray or ambiguous areas of politics, it’s more about looking at how, regardless of these massive, historical shifts affecting your daily life, you still have to get up in the morning, you’ve got to make a little tea, find a job, cook something for your ailing father. It’s about understanding the impact on the human scale. Sometimes being a rebel is just finding a way to make it through the week.

RS:   The novel suggests that imprisonment can take many forms—geographical, psychological, familial, even linguistic. When writing The Renovation, were you consciously exploring these multiple forms of confinement, or did the theme emerge gradually through the characters and the narrative itself?

KO: The idea of having a prison cell at the center of this story probably came out of my own obsessions and interests. A lot of my fiction before this was either directly about prison and arrests or else certainly ended in a place where the logical outcome would be prison. But once the image was in place, the conscious effort was to use it as a way to talk about many different forms of separation and isolation. I wanted to keep it from being stale, I wanted the prison in Dilara’s bathroom to be constantly in flux, a space that shifted to meet the themes of the scene. Beyond the political, I was very much interested in the forms of isolation that occur in situations where, even right next to a person, even primed and desperate for connection, there are things that sever our relationships or sever our connection to our own identities. The way dementia cuts off an individual from the world around them can in many ways look similar to the way an immigrant might feel isolated in their new home. Language as connector is a very delicate pathway when it is foisted into extreme or unfamiliar circumstances. How do we connect when we can’t speak, when we no longer share a history?

RS: Looking back on the writing of The Renovation, what was the most difficult aspect of the novel to achieve artistically—the voice, the structure, the emotional register, or the central conceit itself? What did the book teach you about your own practice as a novelist?

KO: I was lucky that many parts of this book came easy for me. That the voice was so strong in my head, that the conceit that prompted me to write it seemed like a given, and that so much of my own emotional explorations were included helped build my confidence in the emotional core of the book, but the structure was difficult. In a book that spends so much time looking backward but also so much time looking at large-scale current events from a distance, it was tricky to make sure I put scenes in their optimal places, that they ended at just the right moment, that they influenced and were influenced by the scenes around them in ways that allowed a deeper creation of meaning and so that the end result isn’t a jarring cacophony. A lot of the success of that was thanks to my editors. But this book sadly only taught me how to write this book. When I finished, it felt like there was nothing else left in me. Eventually, months later, I started the next project but all the confidence was gone, it felt like I’d never written anything before. I had to learn all over again, and to my chagrin it was not as easy as The Renovation. Part of writing is luck. Part of writing is the right idea striking at the right time. Most of writing is being open to those ephemeral notions that float in your unconscious until they spill out of you in a surprise. You can’t trace them back to their roots. You shrug and use them while you can.

Thank you, Kenan, for talking to The Wise Owl about your book and the inspiration behind your novel. We wish you the very best in all your creative and literary endeavours.