Suzy Hansen is a writer based in New York and Istanbul, and a former Practitioner-in-Residence at New York University’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. She served as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University in spring 2020 and was an ASU Future Security Fellow at New America from 2019-2020. She taught writing in Bard College’s Globalization and International Affairs program for four years.
Hansen has worked as a senior editor at the New York Observer and as an editor in the Books section at Salon. In 2007, she was awarded a two-year fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs to live in and write about Turkey. Her writing has appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and New York Magazine.
Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017 and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book on International Affairs. Her second book, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan, will be published in 2026.
Hansen received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.