Emine Sevgi Özdamar grew up in various places in Turkey and attended drama school in Istanbul between 1967 and 1970. Following the military coup in 1971, she was able to continue working as an actress in Turkey until 1976 despite her membership of the Turkish workers’ party. The productions she appeared in included works by Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht. Due not least to the violent government repression in Turkey, she decided to go to Berlin, where she had already spent some time between 1965 and 1967. There she worked as an assistant to renowned theatre directors such as Matthias Langhoff, Einar Schleef and Claus Peymann.

Besides working as an actor and director, Özdamar herself began writing and producing plays, which were later followed by stories and novels. Her first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei (english Life is a Caravanserai, 2000), describes a childhood in Turkey in the 1950s. Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (english The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 2007) tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl and is located in Istanbul, Berlin and Paris around 1968. Finally, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003) accompanies a young theatre producer who migrates from Turkey to occupied Berlin. These three novels make up the Istanbul-Berlin trilogy, which in 2006 was published in one volume titled Sonne auf halbem Weg. By translating Turkish idioms and images into German, Özdamar has developed her own language which transforms switching between languages into a poetic central process..

Selected works:
Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde. Wedding – Pankow 1976/77 (Roman, 2003)
Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (Roman, 1998)
Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, hat zwei Türen, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (Roman, 1992)
Mutterzunge (Erzählungen, 1990)