Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Emine Sevgi Özdamar (; born 10 August 1946) is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish origin who has lived and worked in Germany since 1976. Özdamar's art is distinctive in that it is influenced by her life experiences, which straddle the countries of Germany and Turkey throughout times of turmoil in both. One of her most notable accomplishments is winning the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

Özdamar's literary work has received much recognition and scholarly attention. A lover of poetry, she found great inspiration in the works of Heinrich Heine and Bertolt Brecht, especially from an album of the latter's songs which she had bought in the 1960s in Berlin. She later decided to study with Brecht's disciple Benno Besson in Berlin, where she resides.

Personal life Emine Sevgi Özdamar was born 10 August 1946 in Malatya, Turkey. She grew up with her grandparents and lived in the Turkish cities of Istanbul and Bursa. In 1965, she travelled to Berlin for the first time and got a job in a factory there. She originally came to Germany to be near her older brother, Ali, who studied in Switzerland at the time; it was easier to move to Germany than to Switzerland. Özdamar had acted and performed plays since she was twelve years old and originally wanted to do both when she came to Europe: acting and seeing her brother. Özdamar's parents were against their 18-year-old daughter's plan, but gave in eventually.

Özdamar lived in a residence in West Berlin with 120 other Turkish women. After seven months, her father finally paid for her to take language classes at the Goethe Institute in order to learn the language properly. It was named "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement. The short stories explore the identity of a Turkish woman living in Germany and how inextricably linked to language this identity is. The narrator has lost her mother tongue, Turkish, and speaks fluent, but flawed, German. The narrator remembers an occasion when she and her mother were speaking Turkish, "Meine Mutter sagte mir: 'Weißt du, du sprichst so, du denkst, daß du alles erzählst, aber plötzlich springst du über nichtgesagte Wörter'" (My mother said to me: 'You know, you talk as though you think you're telling me everything, but you suddenly jump over unsaid words'). ("the warm body part, the love source of my language, my feelings, my childhood, my adolescence.")

Emine Sevgi Özdamar's first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a Caravanserai : Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other), published in 1992, earned her the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize (1991) for single chapters from the novel. This made her the first author of Turkish origin to win the prize and gained her international recognition as a novelist. In the novel, the unnamed first narrator traces life from childhood and adolescence in Turkey, to moving from one place in Turkey to another as the father searches for employment, and at last to the narrator's final departure from her family to Germany in order to start a new life. She speaks of „her Berlin", the first and the second Berlin (separated by 9 years of distance, the first being West-Berlin, the second East-Berlin), the impressions of Istanbul; she speaks of death, of love, of sorrow, of pleasure, and does so while moving through space and time. and it landing on the shortlist for the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Major themes Migration "I am a person who prefers to be in transit. My favourite place is to sit on the train between the countries. The train is a beautiful home." The train between Germany and Turkey, between Europe and Asia is the landscape, which closely describes the life and the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In her most autobiographical texts, Özdamar takes the reader with her on these train journeys between two worlds, where one can experience the complexity of feelings and impressions that come with migration, with moving to a new space, returning to the old, and finding oneself in-between strangeness and familiarity. „Özdamar has made migration a key conceptual and aesthetic programme in her work", Carl Zuckmayer Medal (2010) Schiller Prize of the City of Mannheim (2022) Bertolt-Brecht-Literaturpreis (2026)

Works Karagöz in Alamania, (play, 1982) Mutterzunge, (short stories, 1990, ) The issue Maman/Mutter 2018 of the literary review la mer gelée published a version of the story Mutterzunge (in German, together with a French translation), slightly corrected by the author. Keleoğlan in Alamania, (play, 1991) Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus, (novel, 1992, ) engl. "Life is a Caravanserai Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other" tr. Luise von Flotow UMiddlesex Press 2000. Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, (novel, 1998, ), engl. The Bridge of the Golden Horn, publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2009, Der Hof im Spiegel, (short stories, 2001, ) Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde, (novel, 2003, ) Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur, Ece Ayhan'lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlüğü, Ece Ayhan'ın makrupları. (2007, ISBN 978-975-08-1305-4) Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum, (novel, 2021, Suhrkamp )