Sedef Ecer

Sedef Ecer — Biography

Child film acting came before writing for Sedef Ecer, a Turkish-French playwright and novelist who works in both Turkish and French. Her first novel, Trésor national (2021), written in French, draws on her own experience as a child star; her plays have been translated into many languages and staged in France and Türkiye.

She came to cinema as a child and says she appeared in about twenty-five Turkish feature films between the ages of three and ten. She kept acting intermittently as an adult, in İki Başlı Dev (1990) and Yengeç Sepeti (1994) among others, then settled in France and turned to writing for the stage. Her French-language play Sur le seuil (2008, in Turkish Eşikte) was her first major step, followed by À la périphérie (Turkish version Kenardakiler), the Turkish-language e-mülteci.com and the political satire Lady First. In 2011 she co-wrote and appeared in the French television comedy Comme chez soi.

She received a French writing award in 2008, was artist-in-residence at the Maison d'Europe et d'Orient in 2013, and in 2023 took up the Randell Cottage Writers' Residency in Wellington, New Zealand. She attended Boğaziçi University, and her education also includes Galatasaray High School and the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique in Paris. In 2021 she wrote an article in Le Monde on Türkiye's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.