Ege Dündar. Image: PEN International
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘This Genuine Passion for Youth’
Among the most-watched of young activists in the publishing space this year, Ege Dündar is a thoughtful, innovative, fast-rising thinker and writer who’s the youngest person to serve on the board of PEN International.
While Dündar’s eloquent input has been part of several events during Frankfurt Week, one such moment was The Future of Writing and Free Expression: Promoting Young Voices and Peer-to-Peer Solidarity Around the World. In that event, Dündar introduced younger voices to the fray. In that session, he moderated a talk with writers Fatoumata Ngom; Zoya Miari; and Nedim Turfent on Center Stage.
That session, programmed by Frankfurt’s John Steinmark, was backed by PEN International’s Young Writer Committee and Frankfurt Book Fair itself, and will seat Dündar in the specialization he has cultivated so impressively: that of young, democratic activists’ impresario. A graduate in international politics at City University London, he’s also the author most recently of the 2023 All These Things Aren’t Really Lost.
“If we’re seeking change, we must look to the youth and ways to support them.”Ege Dündar
And if you’d like an immediate look at some of Dündar’s work, check out PEN International’s Tomorrow Club site (tomorrowclub.world) and his new “Spotlight” curation of “Young Voices of the Americas.” Here are young adults writing from Guatemala, Venezuela, Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and more.
Deeply connected in humanitarian channels, Dündar—in case his name is ringing a bell—”gets his activism honestly,” some would say: He’s the 30-year-old son of the celebrated Turkish journalist and documentarian Can Dündar, a recipient of the CPJ International Press Freedom Award and prolific writer. Ege Dündar at 19 saw his father made a political prisoner in Turkey. It changed him.
At 30, the younger Dündar has just gotten his British passport, he tells Publishing Perspectives, so that he, like his father, now has an expatriate’s ease of travel and contact that will help him grow an already promising young career in the humanities.
‘A Boiling Pot of Rising Inequality’
Dündar is keenly involved in the growing youth programs of the World Expression Forum (WEXFO). He was in Krakow in September for the PEN International annual congress, one of more than 200 delegates who found themselves, as he puts it, “less than 300 kilometers from the war in Ukraine and Auschwitz.”
“Young people have been the drivers of change across history and are now busy rallying people of different ages, countries, and ideological divides into acting on shared, urgent concerns.”Ege Dündar
His organizing efforts in Poland were made along with young writers from Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nigeria, Myanmar, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Malawi, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. All is not youthful in Dündar’s purview, of course. The novelist Olga Tokarczuk “joined our leadership as vice-president,” he says, “and another vice-president, Margaret Atwood, reiterated her support.”
In fact, Dündar is canny enough about his interest and activism in leading youth programs to know that talking some veterans make sense. To prepare the curations he’s doing of young writers’ material from various world regions, he has traveled to PEN centers, “talking to the older writer-members about what they think they should do for young people, what is needed in the current context, and then enlisting a young person from that center.”
Give him a minute when you see him, and Dündar will fill you in on how he sees things at this point in Nepal and Turkey and the key roles that young people there are playing.
“The past few years,” he says in a new note that just arrived at Publishing Perspectives, “we’ve witnessed more young people raising their voices to move their societies forward, from Serbia to Bangladesh, Kenya to Nepal, Turkey to Myanmar.
“This is not a coincidence, they are reacting to a boiling pot of rising inequality, corruption, and regression of affordability and civil rights. When they speak up, they are facing many repercussions, silencing, prosecution and state violence, which fans the flames. They watch in real time as their future prospects diminish.
“They witness the environmental and societal breakdown around them, as their countries are mismanaged with economic and social policies that protect the wealthy few and prey on the disadvantaged majority. … If we’re seeking change, we must look to the youth and ways to support them.
“They’ve been the drivers of change across history and are now busy rallying people of different ages, countries, and ideological divides into acting on shared, urgent concerns. Despite having little at hand themselves.”
With his Young Writers Committee and Tomorrow Club at PEN International, Dündar is becoming a new lead among voices of concern, compassion, and democracy, a new go-to leader for movements and writers who know that new generations of power are waiting to be tapped.
“If we’re seeking change,” he says in an interview from London with Publishing Perspectives, “we must look to the youth and ways to support them. They’ve been the drivers of change across history and are now busy rallying people of different ages, countries, and ideological divides into acting on shared, urgent concerns. Despite having little at hand themselves.
“What to do about it and how to support peers rising with the same concerns facing similar consequences is what we need to figure out collectively.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on PEN International is here, and more on the freedoms of expression and publication is here. More on Frankfurter Buchmesse, its events and people, is here.
A version of this story originally appeared in our Publishing Perspectives 2025 Show Magazine.
If you can’t be with us in Frankfurter Buchmesse this year, be sure to download our PDF of the full magazine here.
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