Through a reading of the prison writings of the Kurdish human rights lawyer and politician Selahattin Demirtaş, this paper will explore Demirtaş's multifaceted understanding of literature as fiction (kurgu). Demirtaş, who had no prior literary career, has published five works in Turkish since his incarceration in 2016 in a F-type maximum-security prison in Edirne in northwestern Turkey. These are the short story collections Seher (Dipnot, 2017), Devran (İletişim, 2019), and DAD (Dipnot, 2023) and the novels Leylan (Dipnot, 2020) and Efsun (Dipnot, 2021). (Thus far only Seher is available in English translation.) In his work Demirtaş enters the house of literature as a guest (hostis) and unashamedly embraces this feminized and otherwise undervalued domain as “the backbone of any culture” and “the vanguard of critical thinking.” I would suggest that on the strength of this commitment alone, literary critics should take his work seriously. Existing criticism in English has thus far focused on Dawn and its circulation in media networks. Rejecting the reduction of Demirtaş’s literary politics to a global media activism (“social” or otherwise), my paper will focus on the more substantive imperatives of his prison literature. Focusing on Demirtaş’s use of embedded narration and (meta)fictionality in his understudied novel Efsun, I will explore his thematization of authorship in the light of Hannah Arendt’s enduring essay “Truth and Politics.” I will suggest that like Arendt, Demirtaş recognizes fiction as danger: appropriated by totalitarian and authoritarian rule, fictionality is turned toward the annihilation of reality and its substitution by simulacra. But as Efsun and other writings demonstrate, fiction has also served as an opening to gendered alterity in Demirtaş’s work. In thus reminding us of the capacity of fiction to form nonidentitarian collectivities, he has developed a more sophisticated understanding of the power of literature than that which was available to Arendt. Literature matters here because it is a means of saving the truth, of freeing fictionality from the absolutism of the state, and of generalizing fiction as a ground of democracy.