Maureen Freely


Maureen Deidre Freely is an American journalist, novelist, professor, and translator. She has worked on the since 1996.

Biography

Born in Neptune, New Jersey, she is the daughter of author John Freely, and has a brother, Brendan.
Maureen Freely grew up in Turkey. She graduated from Harvard College. She now lives in England.
She is the mother of four children and two step-children. She was married to Paul Spike, with whom she had a son and a daughter.
Freely is an atheist.

Work

Freely lectures at the University of Warwick and is an occasional contributor to The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. She is the current president of English PEN, the founding centre of PEN International.
Among her novels is The Life of the Party, set in Turkey. She has also written The Other Rebecca, a contemporary version of Daphne du Maurier's classic 1938 novel Rebecca. Freely is also an occasional contributor to Cornucopia, a magazine about Turkey.
She is best known as the Turkish-into-English translator of Orhan Pamuk's recent novels. She works closely with Pamuk on these translations, because they often serve as the basis when his work is translated into other languages. They were both educated simultaneously at Robert College in Istanbul, although they did not know each other at the time.
Freely translated and wrote an introduction to Fethiye Çetin's memoir, My Grandmother.

Works

Novels

of Orhan Pamuk:
of Fethiye Çetin
of Sabahattin Ali
of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
of Sait Faik Abasıyanık