Firat Cewerî is a respected Kurdish novelist, short story writer, and a leading publisher, editor and innovator of contemporary Kurdish literature; nonetheless, his 2009 novel Ez ê Yekî Bikujim (Turkish: Birini Öldüreceğim) met with intense criticism, due to its “anti-heroic” portrayal of Diana, an inexperienced female PKK fighter who is captured, raped and forced into prostitution in Diyarbakir by members of the Gendarmerie Intelligence Organization. First on TRT 6, and then in numerous interviews to follow, Cewerî fiercely defended his short novel’s desperate characters, describing them as “the ones [in Turkish-Kurdish society] who have been marginalized and forgotten”. Accordingly, this paper seeks to closely examine the dynamics between the novel’s three protagonists – Diana; Temo, a disillusioned Kurd recently released from the Diyarbakır prison who suffers from headaches, memory loss and an overwhelming desire to kill; and the diaspora Writer, who is visiting the city for a short book tour – and their relationship to the unforgiving environment into which they are thrust. Both this novel and its 2011 sequel Lehî, complicate the role of the Writer who, like Cewerî, wishes to “save” his characters from “the dark prison in which they reside”, but whose action is thwarted by events beyond his control and, one could argue, his own personal flaws and political impotency. Additionally, this paper seeks to situate the two novels’ critique of collective systems of crime and punishment and their unsparing depiction of the very human experiences of disenfranchisement, guilt and despair that have ensued among Kurds in Southeast Turkey (and beyond) within the context of Firat Cewerî’s life work via multiple methodologies: close reading, qualitative analysis of reception discourse, and direct interviews with the author and Turkish translator. Notably, Cewerî’s work includes his translation of “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov, “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – all “psychological thriller” works that highlight their protagonists’ feelings of loneliness and futility in the face of a changing society – into Kurmanji, a language marginalized since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and banned from the public sphere in Turkey for decades. Due to Firat Ceweri’s role as a mediator between languages and literary forms, I will argue that his novels Birini Öldüreceğim and Lehî, deserve translation into English (and many other languages) and inclusion in international discourse on contemporary world literature because they speak succinctly and effectively to the Kurdish condition of peripherality.