Tezer Özlü

Tezer Özlü (10 September 1943 – 18 February 1986) was a Turkish writer.

Biography She was born in Simav and spent her childhood there and in Ödemiş and Gerede, where her parents worked. She moved to Istanbul when she was 10 years old and attended the Austrian Girls' High School (Avusturya Lisesi) without graduating. In 1961 she went abroad and then hitchhiked around Europe in 1962-1963. She married actor and writer Güner Sümer, whom she met in Paris, in 1964. Together they settled in Ankara. During this period when Sümer was working at the Ankara Arts Theatre (AST), Özlü worked as a German translator. In the 1963–64 season in AST, she played in Brendan Behan's Gizli Ordu (Secret Army), directed by Sümer.

Later, she left Sumer and settled in Istanbul, receiving intermittent treatment in the psychiatry clinics of different hospitals there between 1967 and 1972. She wrote about her childhood experiences and her experience of treatment in Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (published in an English translation by Maureen Freely in 2023 as Cold Nights of Childhood).

In 1968 she married the director Erden Kıral and in 1973 their daughter Deniz was born. Having left Kıral, she went to Berlin in 1981 on a scholarship. She met Hans Peter Marti, a Swiss-born artist living in Canada, and married him in 1984, settling in Zürich.

Özlü was portrayed by Yelda Reynaud in her ex-husband Erden Kıral's film Yolda, in which she describes events during the shooting of the movie Yol.