Yekta Kopan, the cornerstone of our sound memory, has taken a special place on the shelves of our libraries with his books as well as accompanying our lives in those movies we love for years. On the occasion of the author’s new story book, “Bana Kuşlar Söyledi,” (The Birds Told Me) we had a pleasant conversation about both his stories and time.

Bana Kuşlar Söyledi (The Birds Told Me) is a storybook mostly narrated by children. Thus, we sometimes look at the world of adults through the eyes of children in the stories. How did the idea of ​​a child narrator come about? Besides, how would you define childhood?

We consume the world’s limited resources a little more every day. We wake up every day with news of death, massacre, depredation, and destruction. We say that “We are stealing from our children’s future,” but we never face the reasons for this theft. In the first days after the declaration of the pandemic, we pretended to be dealing with ecological problems, environmental disasters, and climate crisis, but at the first occasion, we discarded this information and clung to single-use plastics. Examples can be multiplied. It has been on my mind for a long time to look at this lack of reckoning and this hypocrisy of adults, through the eyes of children. In the past years, while working on the stories “Uyku Koyunu” and “Bızdık”, the idea of ​​a storybook with children narrators has matured. The book was completed with the stories written during the pandemic period. As for my definition of childhood… Maybe I can say this; Childhood is a sentence too long to fit into a description.

As a reader, I think that the texts that affect and shape me the most come from my childhood. For example, I’m glad I grew up reading Samad Behrangi’s story “One Peach, A Thousand Peaches…” What are your childhood books?

I grew up in an environment surrounded by older people. My sister was seven years older than me. I would like to enter the world of those adults as soon as possible and to listen to what they listen to, to read what they read. Frankly, my childhood books were different because of this. When I remember some of the books I had in my library when I was in elementary school, I feel sorry for my own childhood. The Bridge on the Drina, In Dubious Battle, Martin Eden… Nobody never said that “What are you doing, son?”. As you can guess, I wouldn’t understand most parts, and worse, I would have misunderstood. I had also read Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları at that age, and there were even parts that I memorized. The book that saved me from my futile efforts to grow up was Aziz Nesin’s Şimdiki Çocuklar Harika. I think I read it in the fourth grade of elementary school. Our class teacher would call me to the blackboard at the last hour of every day and ask me to read the book aloud to the whole class. I would read with laughter and the whole class would be happy. The first time I experienced the impact of the book on society was in those days when I read in the class. Then I read all the children’s books like I was swallowing. Cem Publishing’s Arkadaş Kitaplar series, Milliyet Publishing’s small hardcover children’s books, children’s novels from Altın Kitaplar and Jules Verne’s… In short, whatever comes to mind about the 70s. Some of these books are still in my library.