Eda Gunaydin

Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist and researcher whose writing explores class, capital, intergenerational trauma and diaspora. You can find her work in the Sydney Review of Books, The Age, Meanjin and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for a Queensland Literary Award and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize. Her debut essay collection Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance won the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. She is a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong.
All essays by Eda Gunaydin
Holding Ground
Somewhere along the way I realised that what I wanted was to make others feel witnessed. This radically altered my orientation towards the world, and the way I communicated the story of my trauma to others: what I am doing is witnessing, staring, even, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, outraged, and taking notes, and connecting dots, and asking what we are going to do about it, out here, in the world.
No Struggling Alone
That the unit of the individual is too small to enact political transformation is the simple wager that Jodi Dean uses to open Comrade. It is a work of political theory that is well-timed, as neoliberal states have failed their citizens en masse and ideas such as solidarity and mutual aid have threatened to go mainstream in the West.