In the 1990’s, after many years of silence and forgetting, Turkish literature has started to produce a significant number of works on the memory of the historical Armenian presence in pre-1915 Asia Minor and of the Armenian Genocide. This emergent literary production has been going hand in hand with some high profile literary court cases, those of writers who have been vocal about the need for the Turkish state to come to terms with its violent past, most popular two court cases being those of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak. In 2005, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was taken to court for declaring in an interview with the Swiss Newspaper Tages Anzeiger that many Kurds and Armenians were killed in Turkey “and nobody but [him] dares to talk about it.” Then, in 2006, novelist Elif ?afak similarly faced charges of “denigrating Turkishness” under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. ?afak was charged for the publication of The Bastard of Istanbul, a novel that explores memory and the forgetting of the Genocide through following the history of four generations of a Turkish and an Armenian family. My paper examines the prospects and limitations of the literary figures’ involvement in creating a space to talk about the denial of historical violence and connectedly a space to discuss the ongoing state violence against minorities in Turkey. Among the questions I pursue are: Since literature in Turkey attempts to offer an alternative site of memory against the amnesia fostered by official historical accounts what kind of past/ memory is being constructed and how does this memory connect or make sense in the present? What does it mean to remember now and how does literature remember?