Feride Çiçekoğlu

Feride Çiçekoğlu — Biography

Feride Çiçekoğlu (born 27 January 1951, Ankara) is a Turkish screenwriter, writer and academic who trained as an architect. After studying at the Middle East Technical University's Faculty of Architecture, she pursued doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania on a Fulbright scholarship. Following the military coup of 12 September 1980, she was detained and tortured for her political activism and spent four years in prison.

After her release, she published her first book, "Hüzünlü Caz" (Sad Jazz), through Kalem Publishing, where she also worked as an editor. She became widely known for "Don't Let Them Shoot the Kite," a novel drawn from her prison experiences that was adapted into a film of the same name in 1989; in 1992 she won the literature prize of the Lyon Cultural Center for "Babanız Öldü mü?" (Is Your Father Dead?), a collection of ten stories set in the 1980-1990 period. She co-wrote the screenplay of "Journey of Hope" (Reise der Hoffnung) with Xavier Koller, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1990.

A faculty member at Istanbul Bilgi University since 1999, Çiçekoğlu continues to write on the relationship between the city, women and cinema, and was honored with a Labor Award at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival in 2025.