The 78th Yunus Nadi Awards have been awarded. Organized by the Cumhuriyet Foundation, this year’s Best Novel Award went to Hikmet Hükümenoğlu for his novel Harika Bir Hayat.
The winners of the 2023 Yunus Nadi Awards have been announced. In the 78th edition of the competition, 9 works in 6 fields were deemed worthy of awards by the selection committees after a difficult evaluation process.
The selection committee consisting of Konur Ertop, Asuman Kafaoğlu-Büke, Zeynep Aliye, Öner Yağcı and Gamze Akdemir decided to award the 78th Yunus Nadi Novel Prize to Hikmet Hükümenoğlu’s book Harika Bir Hayat.
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Harika Bir Hayat
It’s wonderful!
A diamond in the rough. A bomb ready to explode. A unique butterfly flying to its death.
A life that began in 1919 and we don’t know when it ended – yet. The life of an incredible woman, Harika, who made everything she touched beautiful and left her mark even on those she didn’t. Some of us know her as Harika, some of us as H. Kara, some of us as H. Ak – and these are just her known identities. In the difficult years of our recent history, she is a woman who wanders among the faces we know, a woman who looks normal on the outside, but who can never be predicted when she will show something extraordinary.
A great actress, a great poet, a great intelligence officer, a great… Great!
Hikmet Hükümenoğlu, the author of Körburun, never ceases to surprise.
You can meet a new Harika at any moment.
“It was as if I stepped back and another woman stepped into the light,” Harika would say months later, describing her feelings. This other woman was determined, confident, and unconcerned about what others thought. The voice in her head that kept telling her she wasn’t good enough was gone, and her spirit lightened as soon as the burden was lifted.
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Hikmet Hükümenoğlu was born in 1971 in Istanbul. He has published the novels Kar Kuyusu (2005), Küçük Yalanlar Kitabı (2007), 47 Numaralı Kamara (2010), 04:00 (2012), Körburun (2016), Atmaca (2020), Harika Bir Hayat (2023) and the short story collection Aşka İnanmayanlar İçin Aşk Öyküleri (2018). He won the Attila İlhan Novel Prize in 2017 for Körburun.
