Freely lectures at the
University of Warwick and is an occasional contributor to
The Guardian and
The Independent newspapers. From 2014 to 2021, she served as President/Chair of
English PEN, the founding centre of
PEN International. She was later made an Honorary Vice President. Four of her eight novels –
The Life of the Party (1986),
Enlightenment (2008),
Sailing Through Byzantium (2013), and
My Blue Peninsula (2023) – are set in Turkey. She is also the author of
The Other Rebecca (2000), a contemporary version of
Daphne du Maurier's classic 1938 novel
Rebecca. Freely is an occasional contributor to
Cornucopia, a magazine about Turkey. She is best known as the Turkish-into-English translator of
Orhan Pamuk's recent novels. She worked closely with Pamuk on these translations, because they often serve as the basis when his work is translated into other languages. although they did not know each other at the time.
Marie Arana praised Freely's translations of Pamuk works like
Snow,
Istanbul: Memories and the City, and
The Museum of Innocence as "vibrant and nimble" translations. Freely translated and wrote an introduction to
Fethiye Çetin's 2008 memoir,
My Grandmother. She went on to translate its sequel,
The Grandchildren, as well as
Tuba Çandar's biography of the assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink. Freely has also translated or co-translated 20th century Turkish classics by such authors as
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar,
Sait Faik Abasıyanık,
Sabahattin Ali,
Suat Derviş,
Sevgi Soysal, and
Tezer Özlü. Freely was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012. == Bibliography ==