Yadé Kara

Yadé Kara — Biography

German is the language Turkish-born novelist Yadé Kara writes in. She entered literature with her first novel Selam Berlin, which found readers and in 2004 brought her two significant prizes: the Deutscher Bücherpreis (German Book Prize) and the Adelbert von Chamisso sponsorship prize; the first goes to the most successful debut novel, the second to a work by an author whose mother tongue is not German. Her use of a male protagonist as narrator has been described as a distinctive style that sets her apart from many contemporaries.

She was born in Çayırlı in eastern Anatolia; her parents moved to Germany when she was a child, and she grew up in West Berlin. She studied English and German philology and drama at the Schiller Theater. Before turning to writing she worked as an actress, teacher and journalist in cities such as London, Istanbul and Hong Kong, and contributed pieces to radio and television.

Selam Berlin (2003) is set between the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, and the press called it "the Turkish answer to the Wende". It appeared in Turkish from İnkılâp in Nafer Ermiş's translation, and in Italian. Her second novel, Café Cyprus (2008), is set in London in the early 1990s and is, in the author's words, a coming-of-age story. Both books were published by Diogenes in Zürich.