Overland Park native Kenan Orhan snags Booker Prize nomination with debut novel The Renovation

Courtesy of the author

There’s “famous,” and then there’s “literary famous.”

Actors, directors, rock stars and major public figures get stopped in the street and asked for photos because they’re recognizable on sight. Famous authors (with the exception of Stephen King, Margaret Atwood or George R.R. Martin), by contrast, live relatively unbothered. You know their names, but not their faces. Even if you did, enough people look like Jonathan Franzen that you can’t tap every one who resembles him on the shoulder at Whole Foods to ask for an autograph.

Turkish-American Overland Park native Kenan Orhan is literary famous (and only looks a little like Jonathan Franzen). If you don’t know his name yet, you’re about to.

Orhan’s career is still young, but he’s already racked up serious attention. In 2019, his short story Soma received an O. Henry Prize. The 2023 short story collection I Am My Country—his first published book—was a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and longlisted for The Story Prize.

Now, Orhan gets to add the most exciting accolade yet: Booker Prize nominee for his first novel, The Renovation.

Even if you don’t follow the UK-based Booker Prize, you’re almost certainly familiar with some winners and nominees, including Atwood’s The Testaments, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Percival Everett’s James, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. So far, Paul Beatty (The Sellout) and George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) are the prize’s only American winners. Should Orhan win, he’d be the first Turkish-American recipient, and the first from Kansas City.

If none of that got you excited, consider this: Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is one of this year’s judges.

Orhan’s stories tackle serious subjects like loss, identity and memory, tinged with playful surrealism.

In the short story The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra, an Istanbul garbage collector creates a cultural center in her attic made up entirely of items (and people) who’ve been thrown in the trash. In The Renovation, a woman discovers her renovated bathroom doesn’t contain a new toilet or bathtub, but a maximum security Turkish prison, complete with guards.

The Booker Prize longlist of 13 novels, including The Renovation, was announced July 28. The list of six finalists drops Sept. 22, with the winner announced Nov. 9.

Orhan spoke with The Pitch about his work, his reaction to the nomination, and life as a full-time author in Kansas City.

Abby Olcese, The Pitch: How does it feel to be nominated for a Booker Prize for only your second book, after your first was nominated for a PEN? And for your first novel?

Kenan Orhan: It feels really great. I think it’s easy in the arts to view the success of others in a way that removes success from you. Social media lends itself to that, and I don’t do much social media now, so it changes how I learn about new books. I talk to booksellers and check new release tables. So all that to say, (the release of The Renovation) felt kind of insular this time around. It primed me for appreciating every moment of the release. With (I Am My Country), having not experienced book publishing before, I was more anxious.

With the Booker announcement, I felt like I was prepped for a huge moment of euphoria. It feels like the biggest thing in the world to me. It still feels shocking and dreamlike. I credit that mostly to the lack of sleep and the fact that when they called me I was in Seattle, so I already felt off from the time change. I was anxiously awaiting the 8 a.m. reveal, and I had a strange fear they’d contacted me by mistake. Goes to show no matter what I do, I’m anxious about stuff.

And you had to sit on that information for a little while before it went public, right?

They told me about 13 days or so beforehand. Sometimes people don’t know until 3 days beforehand. It was like waiting for Christmas for two weeks.

How do you describe your own work? I can think of other authors it reminds me of, like Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges, but it’s also pretty hard to pigeonhole into a subgenre.

I like to call myself a fabulist because it’s very related to (Invisible Cities author) Italo Calvino, who’s a huge influence. Because of the visual art world, the term surrealism has a preconception. It makes people expect something like Salvador Dalí, which I don’t really do. I shy away from that term, but I don’t mind it. Magical realism has that same thing too, where it encompasses a more specific place and time, like late 20th-century South America.

Fabulism feels truer to me anyway because a lot of my work is rooted in traditions of fantasy, fables, and fairy tales. Not high fantasy necessarily, but basic, short stories, like Grimm’s tales and Calvino. There’s a desire to have fun tricks in my stories every now and again.

A lot of authors who work in a similar arena come from underrepresented backgrounds, or from places associated with political dissidence and exile. That latter definition fits your work, too. Why do elements of surrealism and fabulism work for exploring eras of cultural and political turmoil, like the moment we’re in right now?

If you look at it historically and politically, it generally offers a nice way of countering traditionalists or empowered culture. It stands in contrast to social realism, the quiet interior, less emotion, WASPy literature that was bigger in the 50s and 60s, though postmodernism was around then, too, but it’s breaking out of those expectations and traditions. Surrealism and fabulism lend themselves to that.

Fabulism, being born out of oral traditions, has shaped it as a mode that can really speak to the hallmarks of those experiences, those of people not in power, suffering under structures of oppression. It’s built for speaking against authoritarianism. Authoritarianism wants to force things into a past that feels nostalgic, but surrealism is born out of this sense of disillusionment with the systems at play and an enormous amount of hope, which is interesting, because I don’t consider myself a very hopeful person. I think any mode of storytelling that uses magic a little is so life-affirming for some reason. Realism can be life-affirming too, but something about fabulism is poised well to speak on those things.

In general, I’ve noticed a lot of speculative fiction and work featuring magical realism and surrealism (like R.F. Kuang, Stephen Graham Jones, or Nnedi Okorafor) showing up on best-of lists and awards lists lately. Does it feel to you like that corner of literature is having a moment?

I’ve noticed it as well. I’m biased because when I was teaching, that was my bread and butter, and I still read it a lot. But other authors and professors I knew even then had been complaining about the slide away from realism, so that must mean that it’s happening. I admit, I think I’ve noticed the shift most in visual media. Indie movies and arthouse movies have more surreal moments and strange situations. It’s really interesting.

Part of the appeal, to me, is that it’s a universalizer. No one knows what it’s like to suddenly have a prison in their bathroom. If I start with a premise like that, it creates a place where readers start from the same point. The reader might have no experience of political oppression or maybe they do, but no matter what, it all starts with “this is weird.” It’s a level jumping-off point to prime us for the empathy that’s required in reading. It helps us live the character’s experiences.

I’m confident life has always been strange, but I think our ability to record and present the strangeness of life to all the people on earth simultaneously, it’s created this idea that life is strange. It’s easier to see everything. That comes with its own weirdness.

You write mainly about Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and people living with the effects of that authoritarian regime. But I notice a lot of parallels to the way you talk about, say, damage to monuments and cultural institutions in Istanbul, and the way Americans are currently experiencing similar damage under Trump. It never fails to shock me that you can just do that stuff to buildings and organizations that have been around for generations.

It’s wild what a system of government can do when it ignores rules. It’s been tough; it’s an understatement. Turkey is an interesting case, being on the periphery of Europe and influencing other authoritarian movements in Europe. It’s also unique in that it’s created an authoritarian multiparty parliamentary system. It gives people a way to feel like they’re part of an opposition that’s a compromised opposition.

“Palace of favors” is how things are ruled over there. That’s the most disheartening thing I see repeated globally and in our backyard. This idea that justice only exists as a warped thing that you pay for is all too obvious a next step after our healthcare system. Looking at Turkey since 2013 and hoping Western democracies see this as a cautionary tale, but instead watching them use it as a pathway to their own authoritarian means has been really disheartening.

It’s tough also; I’m writing very specifically about Turkey, and there is some overlap, but I want to talk about what’s happening to Turkish people. I hope it resonates with others not because I hope they also live under a regime like that, but because American writers and readers owe it to the world to be more cognizant of foreign literature and cultures.

(America has) such a huge impact on a global stage. It’s kind of a disgusting amount of power. If we’re going to wield it with the best intentions, we should be cognizant of the world around us. Being mindful of our neighbors is an enormously helpful thing. It’s kind of disgusting the number of times I interact with people who don’t know anything about the situation in Palestine, for example. We’re part of a system that encourages us not to look outside, and it has such far-reaching effects.

I know this is a weird time to bring this up after everything we’ve discussed, but: What do you like about living and working in Kansas City?

I grew up in Overland Park, left to do grad school in Boston, and then went to Colorado for a year. I came back here in 2018. It’s difficult to be an artist anywhere, so when you can be in a place that doesn’t pressure you to struggle to survive from a basic socioeconomic standpoint, places like Kansas City are great for artists. There are places like the Nelson-Atkins that are free. It’s a big culture shock to me any time I go to a bigger city and try to go to a museum, and walk in the door, and it’s $40 to go in. This is a city that’s more affordable than a lot of other places. I’d have to sell astronomical amounts of books to live in a bigger city.

I really like that the affordability means we’re getting more artists who come here, and more artists who come from here.

It does surprise me, because I grew up when that was unheard of, but I’m seeing more and more artists who were born in Kansas City or Overland Park or Independence. It feels like creatives are being generated here and interacting with their roots still, which is nice. I am kind of fearful it’ll cause a rise in the cost of living, which might then destroy one of the nicest things about being an artist here. We have a lot of interesting stuff people don’t know about, and I don’t mind keeping it a secret for now.

What does the Booker announcement mean for the future of your career? 

The Booker news is so monumental because it feels like I have a stable career for the first time in my life. I can just do this (writing). I do miss a lot of aspects of teaching, but I also think I got out at the right time. When I was teaching, students still mainly did their own writing and reading. Hearing from friends who still teach, it’s getting tougher, and the joy I got out of it might not be there anymore. It was exciting to introduce students to Octavio Paz, Calvino, other fabulists, and show them that literature doesn’t have to just be Hemingway and Carver.

Do you want to keep writing short stories or focus more on novels moving forward?

I love short stories; I love reading them and writing them. I’m probably a better short story writer, though evidence is mounting to the contrary. But I wonder if I’m a novelist masquerading as a short story writer. I never could get stories under the 5,000-word count most magazines ask for.

I think I found my home in novels, which is a little sad for me because short stories hold such an important place in my writing. I wrote one in the last year that was in McSweeney’s. For the first time in my life, I’m not producing 3 or more stories a year. But four days before the Booker news, I finished drafting a new novel, and I’m sending it to my publishers soon, so fingers crossed!