I Will Live

Büsra is living a double life. At home with her parents, life is an endless argument - about what time she comes home, about what she wears, and most of all, about how the rules apply only to her, while her brother Halil enjoys free rein.

But out in the world, everything is different. Büsra is studying Dutch literature at university, and she reads everything she can get her hands on. She works at a restaurant, where she wears tight dresses and serves alcohol. And her biggest secret of all: she has a boyfriend, and she is passionately and sinfully in love with him.

Lale Gül was born in 1997 in Amsterdam and is a writer and columnist for the Dutch newspaper Het Parool. Until the age of seventeen, she attended a Koranic school run by the Milli Görüs Foundation at the weekends, then she studied Dutch Language and Literature at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her autofictional debut novel, I Will Live, was published in Dutch in 2021 and became an international bestseller. In 2024 she published a second book, I Am Free, which was also an instant bestseller. She has won numerous prizes, including the NS Publieksprijs, the Euregio Literature Prize, the Pim Fortuyn Prize and Dutchman of the Year.