Unisex Salon Ozan in London’s Hackney borough, northeast of Charing Cross. Image: Richard Charkin
By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin
‘I Am Not a Sartorial Dandy’
I thought I might start the year with an upbeat piece about a strange benefit of authorship.
Richard Charkin
Those who know me personally also know that I am not a sartorial dandy. I’ve been having my hair cut by a local barber, Ozan—he specializes in “Ladies and Gents.”
Ozan Figani’s establishment is not the fanciest in London, nor indeed in Hackney where the bar is set pretty low. However, this shop has a number of things to recommend it to me. First, Ozan, himself. Second, it’s only 10 minutes from my home.
The cut itself takes rather less than 10 minutes. The price is £8 [US$9.77], allowing me to show enormous generosity by rounding it up to £10 [$12.21].
Much to my delight and surprise, my book My Back Pages has been published [by Nokta Yayinlan] in a Turkish translation [by Kadir Yilmaz].
Ozan is Turkish, or so I thought, and I proudly showed him a copy of the Turkish edition while enjoying my Christmas haircut.
Richard Charkin’s ‘My Back Pages’ in its Turkish edition is translated from English by Kadir Yilmaz and published by Nokta Yayinlan
He showed a remarkable amount of interest. He was complimentary about the publisher and very positive about the translator—first class, he said. He wanted my book but I only have one copy of the Turkish edition. No problem, he had a friend nearby who would get him a copy to read (which he did).
I was surprised that a Hackney barber would be so knowledgeable about the world of books.
It turns out that Ozan is a poet and historian and has had several books published in Turkish. I also learned that he was born into a Kurdish-speaking family in Türkiye where it was compulsory to speak Turkish at school. English, which he speaks well, is his third language.
But the story doesn’t end there. Another local customer got to know about Ozan’s poetry and has had it translated into English and is going to publish Harman: The Threshing Floor shortly.
I was sent a proof , and this is part of Ozan’s introduction, which I quote with his permission:
“It was 25 years ago that I opened Ozan Unisex Salon and started working at 40 Whitmore Road, London N1 5QA. This modest place was not only my place of employment but also my private workspace, my office and a very valuable haven where I could meet friends and have musical conversations: It was a rare haven where I could be alone with myself from time to time and do my accounting: It was my sacred home where I could converse and be inspired by the works of the masters who made me love poetry and inspired me to write.
“It was also an institution without a signboard where around 15 research, story, and poetry anthologies were written, prepared for printing, and published.
“Although my energy and effort have decreased over the years, the living room where I memorized the knots on the wooden walls of the shop, which I also consider my home, and even the patterns on the tiles on the floor, and the back room that houses my small archive, still function as they did on the first day I started working.
“And during the 25 years I spent in this unique place, I had the opportunity to get to know people. I listened, tried to learn, and started to question what I knew. The time period I am talking about covers the period in which I reoriented my life and brought it to my current personal stance, both positively and negatively.
“I became friendly with some of my customers and had deep conversations with them. John Hewett, a retired electrical engineer, who had worked in the Middle East as a young man, was very interested in my work and endeavored to understand it and my reasons for leaving my home and why I’m here in London today.
“John learned more about my music and poetry during this period and asked me to tell him about some poems. The themes I dealt with caught his attention, so with the help of AI, he translated some poems from Harman, the printed book I gave him. When he showed me the examples he had translated, the following idea came to mind: ‘Why don’t we make a selection and publish a book in English?’
“Based on this thought, John started working on the 60 poems (out of the many thousands I had written) that we had selected together.”
Who would have thought that through writing my own book I’d discover a wholly different literary canon, friends, and community? Books link people in totally unpredictable but joyful ways.
May 2025 serve all of us with such positive stories.
Ozan in his barbershop in London with a galley of his forthcoming anthology, ‘Harman.’ Image: Richard Charkin
Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here. Richard Charkin’s opinions are his own, of course, and not necessarily reflective of those of Publishing Perspectives.
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