Berkay Doğan
Poet & Writer
Berkay Doğan is a contemporary Turkish poet and writer based in Istanbul. His work inhabits the space between the individual's inner world and the restless pulse of the modern city — exploring solitude, memory, alienation, and the quiet conflicts that define existence in our time.
His debut collection, Ink and Ember: A Poet's Reckoning (Mürekkep ve Köz: Bir Şairin Hesabı), published by İskenderiye Yayınları, marks his arrival as a distinctive voice in modern Turkish poetry. His themes orbit love, loneliness, existential inquiry, and the inner fractures of contemporary life.
Official site: berkaydoganpoetry.com
On Writing
For Berkay Doğan, writing is less an act of production than a practice of being. His texts are not records of lived moments but the belated recognition of emotions that went unnoticed as they were felt. The city, solitude, and the self in conversation with itself form the bedrock of his work.
He regards literature not as narrative but as a field of witness. Poetry, for him, is less an aesthetic form than the language of questions one directs at oneself.
Influenced by Arthur Rimbaud and the existentialist literary tradition, as well as French symbolism and modern existentialist thought. Read the poems →
Author's Note
Writing, for me, is not an occupation — it is a way of existing. More often than not, a poem is born not from a feeling but from a question: Why does one feel alone? Why does one love? Why does one fall silent, and sometimes, why can one not speak at all? I write not to find answers to these questions, but to learn to live alongside them.
Love, solitude, social concerns, and the human being's conflict with the self recur throughout my poems. Rather than narrating life as it is, I trace the contours of emotions we carry but so often cannot name. What I write exists not to construct a story, but so the reader may remember their own.
My first book, Ink and Ember: A Poet's Reckoning, is a record of this search. Not a conclusion — but the natural continuation of the need to write, the inability to stay silent, and the attempt to understand oneself. Each poem is an effort to draw a little closer to who I am.
What writing means to me is simple:
It is the way to scream all my inner cries in silence.