6 - Tradition out of context

Summary

Emine Sevgi Özdamar has become one of the most cited authors in German multi-cultural studies. Born in Malatya, Kurdistan in 1946, she went to Berlin for two years when she was nineteen to work in a factory. Here, she was introduced to the work of Brecht, and on her return to Turkey in 1967 she began her studies at drama school in Istanbul. In 1976 she left Turkey again to work at the Volksbühne in East Berlin as an actor and assistant director with Benno Besson, a pupil of Brecht's. From 1979 to 1984 she worked at the Schauspielhaus in Bochum, and it was here that she began to write. She wrote her first commissioned play, Karagöz in Alamania, in 1982 (first performed in Frankfurt in 1986), her book of short stories Mutterzunge was published in 1990, and her second play, Keloglan in Alamania, in 1991. It was with her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus, (1992) (Life is a caravanserai; it has two doors, I came in through one and went out of the other), that she had her breakthrough, and an excerpt won her the Ingeborg Bachmann prize in 1991. A second novel, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of Golden Horn), a sequel to the first, was published in 1998 and a second collection of stories, Der Hof im Spiegel (The Courtyard in the Mirror), was published in 2001.