Maureen Freely

Maureen Deidre Freely (born July 1952) is an American novelist, professor, and translator. She has worked on the Warwick Writing Programme, University of Warwick, since 1996.^[1]

Born in Neptune, New Jersey, United States,^[2] she is the daughter of author John Freely.^[3][4] She has a sister, Eileen, and a brother, Brendan.^[5][6] 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. Her first husband was Paul Spike, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Her second husband was Frank Longstreth, with whom she had two daughters. Freely is a fourth-generation atheist.^[7][8]

Freely lectures at the University of Warwick^[9] and is an occasional contributor to The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. From 2014 to 2021, she served as President/Chair of English PEN, the founding centre of PEN International.^[10][11][12] She was later made an Honorary Vice President.

Four of her eight novels – The Life of the Party (1986), Enlightenment (2008), Sailing Through Byzantium (2013), and My Blue Peninsula (2023) – are set in Turkey. She is also the author of The Other Rebecca (2000), a contemporary version of Daphne du Maurier's classic 1938 novel Rebecca.^[13] Freely is 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 worked closely with Pamuk on these translations, because they often serve as the basis when his work is translated into other languages.^[13] They were both educated simultaneously at Robert College in Istanbul,^[14] although they did not know each other at the time. Marie Arana praised Freely's translations of Pamuk works like Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, and The Museum of Innocence as "vibrant and nimble" translations.^[15]

Freely translated and wrote an introduction to Fethiye Çetin's 2008 memoir, My Grandmother.^[16] She went on to translate its sequel, The Grandchildren, as well as Tuba Çandar's biography of the assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Freely has also translated or co-translated 20th century Turkish classics by such authors as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Sait Faik Abasıyanık, Sabahattin Ali, Suat Derviş, Sevgi Soysal, and Tezer Özlü.

Freely was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.^[17]

• Rose Bialer, "An Interview with Maureen Freely", Asymptote.