Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Biography

Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 1946 in Malatya, Turkey) is a writer, director and actress of Turkish origin who has lived and worked in Germany since 1976. She grew up in Istanbul and Bursa and first travelled to Berlin in 1965, where she stayed as a guest worker. After returning to Germany in 1976 she worked as a director’s assistant to Benno Besson at the Volksbühne. Her work draws on her experiences between Turkey and Germany; in 1991 she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for chapters of her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, becoming the first author of Turkish origin to receive it.