Turkish journalist and novelist Ahmet Altan, who last February was sentenced to life imprisonment for his alleged involvement in a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, continues work on his ambitious series, the Ottoman Quartet, from Silivri Prison outside Istanbul, and its fourth and final—untitled—volume is devoted to Armenian Genocide, Publishers Weekly reported.

Altan’s website states that the final volume of the Ottoman Quartet is set in 1915 and “tells the tales of the Battle of Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.”

The Ottoman Quartet, launched in 1998 with the publication of Like a Sword Wound, was always intended to be a long-term project. “Such novels take time to write, because one needs to do serious historical research,” Altan said. 

Ahmet Altan is already well-known for his public statements about the genocide, a subject so taboo in Turkey that anyone who mentions it risks jail for “insulting Turkishness.”

And when asked why he felt the need to address the mater of genocide in fiction, he responded: “I think the best narration of the dark and bloody face of history is found in literature. Literature doesn’t only give us the historical truth, it also enables us to form emotional linkage to what happened in history, it enables us to carry inside the marks of the events of the past. The mental tremor one feels while reading the feelings of a woman watching her child being killed is more profound than one’s reaction to the factual statement that ‘one million people were killed.’ The former helps you much better appreciate the truth of it all.”