Mel Kenne

Mel Kenne is a poet, translator and editor who lives in the ancient community of Eski Foça (Phocaea), on the Aegean coast of Turkey. His most recent poetry collections are Take and Galata’dan / The View from Galata, a bilingual collection of his poetry in English and Turkish. South Wind, Kenne's second collection, won the 1984 Austin Book Award, and in 2010 he was a winner of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award. The Book of Ed, a compact disk comprised of a series of Kenne's poems based on the Oedipus myth and set to music by composer Patrick Boland, was released by Ne'er Before Records in 1999. He was chief editor and one of the translators of Aeolian Visions / Versions, a volume of Turkish poetry and prose produced at the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature (2013), and he co-edited the 2016 and 2017 issues of Turkish Poetry Today. He also co-translated with Saliha Paker Dear Shameless Death and Swords of Ice by Turkish novelist Latife Tekin, and co-edited and translated much of the poetry in What Have You Carried Over? Poems of 42 Days and Other Work by Gülten Akın and Pomegranate Garden, poetry by Haydar Ergülen, published in 2014 and 2019 respectively.