Eda Gunaydin
Artist Bio
Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist and researcher. Her debut essay collection Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance won the 2023 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Her essays and short fiction have been published in HEAT, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, and elsewhere.
Eda is a Turkish-Australian essayist originally from Western Sydney. Her writing practice focuses on creative non-fiction (memoir and essays), and explores themes including class and class mobility; diaspora and migration; and intergenerational trauma. She writes bilingually, in English and Turkish, and is interested in unpacking legacies and inheritances entailed by trauma inside the family, whether that be the trauma of migration or the trauma of poverty or gender-based violence.
Inspiration
Eda has recently become an Inner West Writer-in-Residence at the studio space at Writing NSW. She is working on completing her second essay collection, 'This is Where I Leave You'. "The book unravels how recent (ecological and economic) crises have affected how we stage our selves, sex, relationships, and community, with a focus on queer community" (Gunaydin 2024).
With her first book, Root & Branch, she was interested in being attentive to power, place, people and politics, writing on race, suburbia, gentrification and infrastructure in Western Sydney; intergenerational trauma and the legacies of migration inside her Turkish family; and the impacts of class mobility on her life. Her second book will continue this sensitivity to place and, rather than explore her diasporic legacies, will instead turn to the tumultuous shifts faced by young people now. "For twenty-four months headlines have told us that we are living through history, as we have faced fires, floods, a pandemic, a collapsing climate and rising global insecurity and inequality. This work will reflect on how these changes have affected how we relate to each other, to our relationships, to our work and to our homes, especially in the Inner West of Sydney, where I have lived for nearly seven years" (Gunaydin 2024).
"The key message I try to communicate through my writing is that we have to be attentive to people's material circumstances, and unpack how class inflects everyone’s life. I'm also interested in responding to current trends in diaspora literature, which often frame the life of the person living in diaspora as incomplete and divided. You often hear about people in diaspora existing in 'two halves', with one foot caught in one place and another foot in another. My work instead investigates how we can actually build very full, complete lives in the places that we are, even if that entails the responsibility of grappling with the sometimes violent histories of those places" (Gunaydin 2024).
Upcoming shows
Check out Eda's website or Instagram for updates / appearances.
Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance is available to purchase or can be borrowed from any Inner West library.
Website edagunaydin.com
Instagram @edapresents