Selahattin Demirtaş

Born in 1973, Selahattin Demirtaş is a Zaza-Kurdish politician and former co-leader of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey. He began his political career as a human rights lawyer and helped transform HDP into a more inclusive party, with an emphasis on progressive values, feminism and LGBTQ rights, leading it to become the first party to have an Armenian MP and an openly gay MP candidate, in addition to staunchly defending an agenda of peace between the government and the Kurdish movement. Imprisoned since November 2016, Demirtaş ran for president in 2014 and again in 2018, where he conducted his campaign from his prison cell, and still managed to come in third with nearly 10% of the national vote. Demirtaş is still being held at a maximum security prison in Edirne, where he has written six books so far, the short story collections Seher (Dawn), Devran (Devran: The Tide Will Turn), and Dad, as well as three novels: Leylan (Mirage, or the Life You Thought), Efsun, and his latest, Arafta Düet (Duet in Purgatory), co-authored with Yiğit Bener, which in total have already sold over half a million copies. His works have been published in over a dozen languages.