The bitter struggle of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) against the Turkish state has endured for decades in the face of major setbacks and violence. This memoir tells that story through the experience of one person, Sakine Cansiz—codenamed “Sara”—a cofounder of the PKK who dedicated her life to its cause—until she was assassinated in 2013.
            This memoir, available for the first time in English, tells the story of the first chapter of Cansiz’s life, from the founding of the PKK in 1974 through her arrest in 1979. She writes here about the excitement of entering the movement as a young woman—and discovering quickly that she would have to challenge traditional gender roles as she rose among its ranks. And she succeeded: total gender equality is now one of the central tenets of the PKK.
            Today, Sara lives on, an inspiration to women fighting for liberation around the world. Her story, told in her own words, is by turns shocking, violent, and groundbreaking.

The second instalment in a gripping memoir by Sakine Cansiz (codenamed 'Sara') chronicles the Kurdish revolutionary's harrowing years in a Turkish prison, following her arrest in 1979 at the age of 21. Jailed for more than a decade for her activities as a founder and leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, she faced brutal conditions and was subjected to interrogation and torture. Remarkably, the story she tells here is foremost one of resistance, with courageous episodes of collective struggle behind bars including hunger strikes and attempts at escape. Along the way she also presents vivid portraits of her fellow prisoners and militants, a snapshot of the Turkish left in the 1980s, a scathing indictment of Turkey's war on Kurdish people - and even an unlikely love story. The first prison memoir by a Kurdish woman to be published in English, this is an extraordinary document of an extraordinary life. Translated by Janet Biehl.