Nermin Bezmen

Kurt Seyt & Shura official English edition, published December, 2017. An instant best seller since its debut in 1992, Nermin Bezmen’s Kurt Seyt & Shura is a classic of contemporary Turkish literature, a sweeping romantic drama set around the time as the splendor of Imperial Russia is obliterated in the wake of the Great War. Bezmen tells the story of two star-crossed lovers fleeing the wave of devastation wreaked by the Bolshevik Revolution– and does so with great sensitivity: one half of this couple who sought refuge in the capital of the dying Ottoman Empire was her grandfather.

Translated into 12 languages, Kurt Seyt & Shura inspired a sumptuous T.V. series that continues to enchant millions of viewers across the world.
With the publication of this novel in the United States, English-speaking fans will now be able to read the true story of this great love affair, which triumphed over so much adversity yet failed to overcome human fallibility.

Kurt Seyt: The son of a wealthy Crimean nobleman, is a dashing first lieutenant in the Imperial Life Guard. Injured on the Carpathian front and later sought by the Bolsheviks, he makes a daring escape across the Black Sea. Too proud to accept payment for the boatful of arms he hands over to the Nationalists, he faces years of struggle to make a new life in the Turkish Republic rising from the embers of the dying Ottoman Empire. All he has is his dignity and love.

Shura: An innocent sixteen-year-old beauty enchanted by Tchaikovsky’s music and Moscow’s glittering lights, falls in love with Seyt. A potential victim of the Bolsheviks due to her family’s wealth and social standing, she is determined to follow her heart and accompanies Seyt on his perilous flight over the Black Sea.

Their love is the only solace to their crushing homesickness for a land and family they will never see again, two lovers among hundreds of thousands of White Russian émigrés trying to eke out a living in occupied Istanbul.

About the Author: 

Nermin Bezmen was born in 1954, and raised in Turkey. She graduated from Basic High School in Henderson, Nevada which she attended on an American Field Service (AFS) scholarship.

After an active and diverse business career she was introduced to the “Traditional   Turlash Arts” by Pamtress Shermin Bezmen, her mother-in-law. She attended courses at the Topkapi Palace Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts that she concluded with flying colors. She became one of the pioneers to spearhead the revival of miniatures and illumination. She took part in twenty-five Exhibitions, nine of them personal. What started as a hobby soon turned out to shape a career of beaux arts, restoration, decorative painting and silk screen printing the traditional vein. At her workshop she teaches about sixty people, holding classes for toddlers, youngsters as well as grown-up ladies and during the last decade hundreds of students have graduated.

Her first brush with literature came in 1991 when she published her collected poems in a volume entitled Love that Awakens. She was already an accomplished journalist as well as a TV Hostess when she, after 8 years of researching her roots in the Crimea, Russia, Prussia, Romania and France, wrote her first historical real life saga. It is focused on the suffering, aspirations, obstinacy, proud arrogance, patient endurance, deep love and painful longing of her ancestors: Kurt Seyt & Shura, published in 1992, became a national bestseller, as did her second novel, Kurt Seyt & Murka.  Her third and fourth novel are entitled The Immigrants of Mengene and The Wings of My Mind respectively.