Jenny White

Jenny White is a writer and a social anthropologist. Her first novel, The Sultan’s Seal, was published in 2006. It is being translated into fourteen languages and is available as a paperback and audiobook. Booklist has named it one of the top ten first novels of 2006 and one of the top ten historical novels of 2006. It was shortlisted for the 2006 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. The sequel, The Abyssinian Proof, was published in February 2008 (W. W. Norton).

Jenny White was born in southern Germany and emigrated with her mother to the United States at the age of seven. They lived in New Rochelle, NY, where she attended grammar and high school. She studied at Lehman College in the Bronx, part of the City University of New York that had been set up for immigrant children. Working her way through school, she has held a variety of jobs. At various times, she has been a switchboard operator, bookkeeper, librarian, file clerk, language teacher, receptionist, patient associate in an abortion clinic, copyeditor, research assistant, teaching assistant, tour coordinator, professor, and now novelist. While at Lehman College, she studied abroad in Germany, where she first met people from Turkey, from which sprang a lifelong interest. After finishing college, she traveled to Turkey and stayed for three years, eventually earning a Master’s degree in psychology from Hacettepe University in Ankara. After working for a couple of years in Montana, she moved to Texas to begin graduate work in anthropology, specializing in Turkey. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991.

Jenny White now teaches social anthropology at Boston University as a tenured associate professor. She has published two scholarly books on contemporary Turkey. Money Makes Us Relatives, a description of women’s labor in urban Turkey in the 1980s, was published in 1994. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey was published in 2002. It explains the rise of Islamic politics in Turkey in the 1990s and won the 2003 Douglass Prize for best book in Europeanist anthropology. Jenny White lives in the Boston area.

"I learned English as a second language, primarily from books. This nurtured my relationship with language and made books my friends. As long as I can remember, I've wanted to be a writer. From my earliest days of learning English, I carried around a notebook in which I sketched the world in words. However, I also had a bent for science, so opportunity and curiosity took me in that direction, to graduate school and a career as an anthropologist. Over the years, the two desires merged, as my scholarly writing became more and more literary (although not fictional), and my experience in Turkey and knowledge of Turkish culture and history infused my fiction writing."