Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Turkey, where her family still lives. She was educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and has made her home in England for the past 22 years. She is the author of three works of non-fiction: Pandora’s Clock (1993,) What About Us? (1995) and The Parent Trap (2000); and seven novels: Mother’s Helper (1979), The Life of the Party (1985), The Stork Club (1992), Under the Vulcania (1994), The Other Rebecca (1996) and Enlightenment (2007), which is set in Istanbul. 

She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and The Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.  For the past ten years she has been the Deputy Director of the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.  She is perhaps best known for her translations of Snow (2003), Istanbul: Memories of a City (2004) and The Black Book (2005), by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and for her campaigning journalism after Pamuk and an estimated 80 other writers were prosecuted (and in the case of Hrant Dink, assassinated) for insulting Turkishness, state institutions, or the memory of Ataturk.