Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Emine Sevgi Özdamar — Biography

Drawing on her own life to explore migration, language and identity, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a Turkish-born writer and theatre artist who writes in German, is counted among the leading voices of contemporary German literature. She received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2022 and then the Bertolt Brecht Literature Prize, and in 2025 she was honoured with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. She lives in Berlin.

She came to literature through the theatre. At twelve she appeared in Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme in Bursa and decided to become an actress; in 1965 she travelled to Germany for the first time and worked in a Berlin factory, then trained in theatre in Istanbul. In 1976 she returned to Germany to work with Brecht's pupil Benno Besson, working at the Volksbühne in East Berlin and later in Paris, Avignon and Bochum. In the 1980s she turned to writing: Karagöz in Germany, one of the first German-language plays written by a Turkish author, was staged in Frankfurt in 1986.

Her real breakthrough came in prose. Her first story collection, Mutterzunge, appeared in 1990; a section of the autobiographical Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei (1992) won the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize before the book was published. Its sequel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998) won the 1999 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. Her work has been the subject of many academic studies in comparative literature and translation studies.