Jenny White

Jenny White is a writer and a social anthropologist. Her first novel, The Sultan’s Seal, was published in 2006. It was translated into fourteen languages. Booklist named it one of the top ten first novels of 2006 and one of the top ten historical novels of 2006. It was shortlisted for the Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. The sequel, The Abyssinian Proof, was published in 2008 (W. W. Norton) and a third Kamil Pasha novel, The Winter Thief, in 2010.

Jenny White was born in southern Germany and emigrated to the United States as a child. She lived in New Rochelle, NY, where she learned English and attended grammar and high school. She studied at Lehman College in the Bronx, part of the City University of New York that had been set up for immigrant children. Working her way through school, she has held a variety of jobs. At various times, she has been a telephone operator, bookkeeper, librarian, file clerk, language teacher, receptionist, patient associate in a clinic, copyeditor, research assistant, teaching assistant, tour coordinator, professor, and now novelist. While at Lehman College, she studied abroad in Germany, where she first met people from Turkey, from which sprang a lifelong interest. After finishing college, she traveled to Turkey and stayed for three years, eventually earning a Master’s degree in psychology from Hacettepe University in Ankara. After working for a couple of years in Montana, she moved to Texas to begin graduate work in anthropology, specializing in Turkey. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.

After teaching for many years as a professor of social anthropology at Boston University, she moved to Stockholm University in Sweden. She has published a number of scholarly books on contemporary Turkey. Money Makes Us Relatives is a description of women’s labor in urban Turkey in the 1980s. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey explains the rise of Islamic politics in Turkey in the 1990s and won the 2003 Douglass Prize for best book in Europeanist anthropology. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks takes a look at the transformations that Turkish Islam and secularism -- and the idea of the nation -- have undergone in the first decade of the 2000s. Turkish Kaleidoscope is a mix of scholarship and fiction, a graphic book drawn by the artist Ergün Gündüz about Turkey in the violent years of the 1970s and their aftermath. it follows the lives of four young people on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Jenny White lives in Sweden.

http://www.jennywhite.net

Photo credit: Jivanna Hopkins