Sevan Nişanyan
| Sevan Nişanyan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
21 December 1956 (age 60) Istanbul, Turkey |
| Nationality | Turkish |
| Occupation | journalist |
| Website | www.sevannisanyan.info |
Sevan Nișanyan (Western Armenian: Սևան Նշանեան, born 21 December 1956) is a Turkish-Armenian intellectual, travel writer, researcher and polymath.
An author of a number of books ("The Wrong Republic", "The Etymological Dictionary" and others), Nisanyan was awarded the Ayşe Nur Zarakolu Liberty Award of the Turkish Human Rights Association in 2004 for his contributions to greater freedom of speech.
He is also known for his work to restore a semi-derelict village near Turkey’s Aegean coast.
Nișanyan was handed a cumulative jail sentence of 16 years and 7 months after he criticized the government’s attempts to prohibit criticism of the prophet Muhammad, in a blog entry in September 2012. He has been held in a maximum-security Turkish prison since January 2, 2014.
There has been an online petition started by his friend and a prominent mathematician Ali Nesin demanding a solution for the Sevan Nisanyan case.
Of Armenian descent, Nişanyan was born in Istanbul in 1956, the son of architect Vagarş Nisanyan. After graduating from the Private Armenian School of Pangaltı he attended Robert College, then studied philosophy at Yale University, concentrating on Kant, Hegel and Thomas Aquinas. He did graduate studies in political science at Columbia University, where he worked under Giovanni Sartori, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Seweryn Bialer and Douglas Chalmers. His PhD thesis (unfinished) concerned competitive strategies of political parties in unstable South American regimes.
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Wikipedia