Recently, Bilkent News interviewed Dr. Laurent Mignon, who will be teaching Türk Edebiyatı 1839-1923 (Turkish Literature 1839-1923) in his first semester at the Turkish Literature Department.
Dr. Mignon was born in 1971 in Arlon, Belgium and grew up in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. He graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and continued his PhD work at the same university writing on Çağdaş Türk Şiirinde Aşk (Love in Turkish Poetry).
Dr. Mignon speaks fluent French and Luxembourgeois (which are his native languages), along with English, German, and Turkish. He is also able to fight his way through Arabic, Dutch, Spanish and Italian texts. Dr. Mignon was only 18 when he first visited Turkey, attending a youth camp in Hatay. It was there that Dr. Mignon’s interest in Turkish culture and language began to blossom. It took Dr. Mignon two years to learn Turkish; he attributes the difficulty experienced by some when learning Turkish to its non-Indo-European grammar and structure.
Dr. Mignon told us “I have always been extremely interested in literature, especially Turkish literature. I often found myself reading Yaşar Kemal and Nazım Hikmet in translation. While I was doing my PhD, I started giving Turkish Literature lessons in England.” When asked about Bilkent University he said that he was impressed by the number of well known faculty working at Bilkent.