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Maureen Freely

Maureen Deidre Freely FRSL (born July 1952) is an American novelist, professor, and translator. She has worked on the Warwick Writing Programme, University of Warwick, since 1996.^[1]

Born in Neptune, New Jersey,^[2] she is the daughter of author John Freely.^[3][4] She has a sister, Eileen, and a brother, Brendan.^[5][6] Maureen Freely grew up in Turkey. She graduated from Harvard College. She now lives in England.

She is the mother of four children and two step-children. Her first husband was Paul Spike, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Her second husband was Frank Longstreth, with whom she had two daughters. Freely is a fourth-generation atheist.^[7][8]

Freely lectures at the University of Warwick^[9] and is an occasional contributor to The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. From 2014 to 2021, she served as President/Chair of English PEN, the founding centre of PEN International.^[10][11][12] She was later made an Honorary Vice President.

Four of her eight novels – The Life of the Party (1986), Enlightenment (2008), Sailing Through Byzantium (2013), and My Blue Peninsula (2023) – are set in Turkey. She is also the author of The Other Rebecca (2000), a contemporary version of Daphne du Maurier's classic 1938 novel Rebecca.^[13] Freely is an occasional contributor to Cornucopia, a magazine about Turkey.

She is best known as the Turkish-into-English translator of Orhan Pamuk's recent novels. She worked closely with Pamuk on these translations, because they often serve as the basis when his work is translated into other languages.^[13] They were both educated simultaneously at Robert CollegeinIstanbul,^[14] although they did not know each other at the time. Marie Arana praised Freely's translations of Pamuk works like Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, and The Museum of Innocence as "vibrant and nimble" translations.^[15]

Freely translated and wrote an introduction to Fethiye Çetin's 2008 memoir, My Grandmother.^[16] She went on to translate its sequel, The Grandchildren, as well as Tuba Çandar's biography of the assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Freely has also translated or co-translated 20th century Turkish classics by such authors as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Sait Faik Abasıyanık, Sabahattin Ali,Suat Derviş, Sevgi Soysal, and Tezer Özlü.

Freely was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.^[17]

• My Blue Peninsula (2023)
• Sailing Through Byzantium (2013)
• Enlightenment (2008)
• The Other Rebecca (2000)
• Mother's Helper (1982)
• The Stork Club (1995)
• What About Us (1996)
• The Parent Trap (2002)
• Under the Vulcania (1994)
• The Life of the Party (1986)

ofOrhan Pamuk:

• The Black Book
• Snow
• Other Colors: Essays and a story
• Istanbul: Memories and the City
• The Museum of Innocence

ofFethiye Çetin:

• My Grandmother (2008)
• The Grandchildren (2014) (authored with Ayşe Gül Altınay)

ofAhmet Hamdi Tanpınar:

• The Time Regulation Institute ^[1] (2014) (translated with Alexander Dawe)

ofSait Faik Abasıyanık:

• A Useless Man^[1] (2014) (translated with Alexander Dawe)

ofSabahattin Ali:

• Madonna in a Fur Coat ^[18] (2016) (Translated with Alexander Dawe)

ofTuba Çandar:

• Hrant Dink : An Armenian Voice of the Voiceless in Turkey (2016)

ofSuat Derviş:

• In the Shadow of the Yali (2021)

ofSevgi Soysal:

• Dawn (2022)

ofTezer Özlü:

• Cold Nights of Childhood (2023)

• Rose Bialer, "An Interview with Maureen Freely", Asymptote.