Tursunay Sultan is a renowned internet writer, known by her online alias Bergiye. She was deprived of her creative freedom at the end of 2017 as she was sent to the concentration camp.
Tursunay Sultan was born in 1979 in Toqquztara County of Ili prefecture to a family of intellectuals. Tursunay started her creative writing career in 1995, with the publication of her poem “Don’t Tell” in Ili newspaper. In 2008, Tursunay rekindled her writing career on the internet with the advent of interactive platforms. She subsequently published numerous short stories on the internet, such as “Prayer at the Grave“, “Suffocated Soul”, “Unfamiliar Roads”, “Frozen Window”, “I’m A Widow but Not a Wicked”, “Get Out Of My Dreams Love”, “The Crying Voice in the Silent Night”, “Man Doesn’t Cry”, “The Woman in the Heart of the Sun”, “Wandering Spring”, and “Bleeding Flower.”
After gaining popularity on the internet, Tursunay’s poems such as “I am a Drop of Tear,” “Laugh of Happiness,” and “One Love in and a Mountain of Pain in the Eye” were published by magazines like “Ili River,” “Kroran,” and “Turpan.” Other poems like “Trust,” “Heart,” and “Butterfly” were published in major newspapers like “Xinjiang Newspaper” and “Ili Newspaper.”
In 2017, Tursunay was sent to a concentration camp, which deprived her of her creative freedom. However, her novel “The Crystal Girl” made a record of the highest number of views (500 thousand times) in Uyghur online literature. The novel was published by the Xinjiang Youth Publishing House in September 2015, and three of Tursunay’s short stories were accepted for the “Silent Nights” short story collection, which will be published by Kashgar Uyghur Publishing House.
