Esmahan Aykol

Esmahan Aykol (born 1970) is a Turkish-born German novelist, best known for her detective novels featuring Kati Hirschel, an Istanbul bookseller of crime fiction.

Biography Esmahan Aykol was born in Edirne in 1970, into a Turkish family from the Balkans; her father is from Macedonia while her grandmother was from Bulgaria.

Aykol received a degree in law from Istanbul University and a postgraduate degree in law from Humboldt University of Berlin, where her dissertation was on discrimination and differences between Turkish and German divorce law.

Aykol's first novel, Kitapçı Dükkani was published in 2001. It featured Kati Hirschel, the owner of Istanbul's only crime fiction bookstore, a woman of German origin, whose inquisitiveness and passion for crime novels leads her to investigate a murder. The book was a bestseller The book is an ode to the ancient art of storytelling, which remains a tradition of great honour among the Kurdish and Armenian communities in Turkey. Ece, stuck in a foreign land, recalls the stories told by her grandfather, an Armenian jeweller, and his experiences during the events of 1915. For authenticity in her novel, Aykol trained at a goldsmith's shop in Kreuzberg, Berlin, as well as with an Armenian silversmith in Istanbul.

Aykol lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul. She has taken up German citizenship.

Selected works

Crime fiction

Novels

In English translation