Hyphenated Lives
Native Diasporas
A novel in verse
By TK Sebastian
Release date: 27 November 2025
Binding Paperback
Format 198 x 129 mm
Pages 128
Price £ 14.99
ISBN 9781068495816
A striking young man in his late twenties, Toros lives with his mother, Meriam and younger sister, Silva in south-west Turkey. It is the spring of 1956, and other than the haunting memories of the autumn, there has been little to evoke the pains of their past lives. None, in fact, except that fateful call which confronts Toros with the looming shadows of his bleak childhood. Assured of his magnificent triumph over his cruel father, he embarks on the most defining journey of his life, oblivious to the twists and turns awaiting him.
A novel in verse, Hyphenated Lives: Native Diasporas, interweaves a constellation of family stories with diplomatic dispatches, international relief reports, testimonies, archival photographs and newspaper clippings, to hold a mirror to the obscured realities, contradicting demands and multifarious guises of survival, under the hegemony of the perpetrator ideology.
This tale is as much a study of remembering as of forgetting, as of a fractured survivor family, as of a people and nation in the bloody aftermath of a collapsing empire.
Winner of the Excellence in Literature prize
International Orthodox Arts Festival (IOAF) 2021
Endorsements
“TK Sebastian shows a great generosity of spirit in this heart-wrenching, beautiful book. To have relived the horrors that rise up through these fragmented memories and shattered lives, and to forge from them the bitter beauty of poetry. To record the betrayals and compromises that continue to pass from generation to generation, but still to have the clarity, the heart, and the strength of conscience to remember those who dared to speak truth to authoritarian power. As the world is again poisoned by the venom of populism, it has never been more important to revisit its past ravages, for only here can we truly understand how important for each and every one of us to join those heroes and let our consciences speak. This is, indeed, a book for our times.”
—Maureen Freely, novelist, academic and translator
“Hyphenated Lives: Native Diasporas is a novel in verse that confronts the enduring legacy of genocide as a condition far beyond physical destruction. Drawing on family histories, archival fragments, and poetic testimony, it gives voice to the survivors and their descendants caught in the aftermath of cultural annihilation. At its heart is the concept of social death – the obliteration of relationships, identities, and communal bonds that once gave meaning to life. Through a chorus of voices – orphans, estranged kin, forgotten towns, and silent graveyards – the book weaves an intimate and unflinching portrait of the intergenerational wounds left by the Armenian Genocide. Cultural amputation, forced assimilation, and the denial of heritage emerge not as footnotes to history, but as its living, breathing consequences. Hyphenated Lives: Native Diasporas liberates genocide from its historical time bracket and turns the lens toward its haunting aftermath: the struggle to remember, to belong, and to remain human. TK Sebastian's groundbreaking achievement opens new frontiers in the investigation and representation of Genocide as well as Decolonisation Studies.”
—Dr Edita Gzoyan, director Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute
“Inspired by family histories and by the author’s inner drive to understand the workings of human souls subjected to but surviving genocide, a truly challenging, artistic treasure has been created. TK Sebastian has written an honest, searing account of the burden of complex emotions that constitute survival. Each individual faces this differently but Hyphenated Lives: Native Diasporas, in the spare lines of poetry, exposes the turbulence of one man’s crumbling efforts to come to terms with the destruction he has witnessed and somehow escaped.
Other characters inhabit this patchwork existence. We hear the bewildered lament of his son, the bitter anger of his abandoned wife, a counter-voice from a dear childhood friend trying to persuade Sevan / Selim that there is life after so many deaths. Sebastian deftly shows the complexity of trauma, the ways in which personality, experience, fate all continue to interact and weave a future, burdened by the past. Through Sevan, the author carefully portrays historical events as they affect her characters, raising hopes, destroying dreams, confusing and wearing out the souls of people trying to smooth out or at least endure life’s struggles.
“I’m begging you to be more human if you can’t be God-like,” Sevan pleads with his Creator. But what “human” is also mystifies Sevan. His bargain with survival is a dance with the enemy, a self-loathing attempt to become what he is not. TK Sebastian’s rendering of Sevan’s and others’ plight never slips into judgement.
Out of the pain described within, Sebastian has created a beautiful monument to those who suffered and a testament to the human soul seeking to somehow repair the ruptures in our universe.”
—Dr Susan Pattie, author and cultural anthropologist
“The amalgamation of testimony, image – the eyes of the orphaned children most strikingly – the tender sharp verse, the shards of history, and the silences of Hyphenated Lives: Native Diasporas, all together – and in enthralling contrast – bring to life a story of survival and what it means to survive in midst of genocide.
TK Sebastian has interlaced tenderness and beauty amid acute loss and horrific rupture with revolting and identity-affirming force. Remembering, reimagining, reverberating in the present-past of descendants’ bloodline. Denying, counteracting the erasure of the oppressor.
A relevant book in times of the ongoing and atrociously inventive cruelty of the genocidal forces against the Palestinian people. A necessary story to awaken the power of words against forced forgetting.”
—Xaviera Ringeling, poet, philosopher and founder of Poesica Pandemica
“What made the Armenian Genocide possible? How did the Greek, Assyrian, Jewish, Yezidi, Bosnian or Rwandan genocides happen? Through TK Sebastian’s searingly beautiful and unflinchingly honest novel in verse, we are not only given a kaleidoscopic look into the inner workings of the perpetrating ideology and the treacherous terrain of survival under its soul-crushing hegemony. A colossal triumph of literature fortified with detailed historical research. A must-read for anyone interested in the Late Ottoman-Early Republican era and the struggle of the land’s indigenous populations.”
—Aris Tsilfidis, historical researcher and founder of The Greek Genocide Resource Centre
“A deeply moving work revealing the hidden agony of the indigenous Armenian and Greek communities in late Ottoman and later, modern-day Turkey. The genre of poetry and device of polyphony enable the voices and innermost thoughts of members of this fractured family to provide profound insights into survivors’ suffering and identity struggles in the aftermath of the genocide. This literary work throbs with a force that has remained with me.”
—Dr Jennnifer Langer, poet, scholar and founder of Exiled Writers Ink