Emine ozdamar biography sample

Major works [ edit ]. Major themes [ edit ]. Style and influences [ edit ]. Awards [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Retrieved 9 August Archived from the original on 17 March Retrieved 14 October Archived from the original on 27 November Die Tageszeitung: Taz in German. Retrieved 17 March Fordham University Press. ISBN Women writers and National Identity.

Campridge: Cambridge University Press. Archived from the original on 10 December For Ozdamar, literature also means life and language is not only a vehicle, but also a substantial part of her personality. At some point, she began writing in German because her mother tongue, Turkish, had lost its innocence during the military dictatorship. Bertolt Brecht's language became her saviour.

In the book, the year-old who heads off to Germany at the end of the novel ends up living out her dream. Just like the author herself. In Berlin, she began working as a director's assistant at the Volksbuhne theatre. Aboard it is a young, rebellious year-old who, against all resistance, is taking her life into her own hands. He gave everybody a plastic container with water, a parcel of food, Deutschmarks, which was part of our month's salary, and a book.

It's clear that the first-person narrator is the author herself — a young Turkish woman who grows up with little money but a great deal of curiosity. When she and her family leave their small Anatolian village for a better life in the big city, two worlds come together: the rural farming traditions of the village on the one hand, Istanbul's Western lifestyle on the other.

The young woman loves Hollywood films with Humphrey Bogart and listens attentively to the fairy tales her beloved grandmother tells at night.

Emine ozdamar biography sample

She masters the art of weaving together two polar worlds to create a unique view of the world — archaic and modern at the same time. A poetic flow of images creates a fictional world between dream and reality. Maybe that's why it hit her so hard that German-Turkish writer Feridun Zaimoglu seemed to have cribbed many of her images and stylistic elements in his celebrated novel Leyla.

Was it a plagiarism scandal? She was clear, however, about the cliches she was reinforcing and knew that she had long overcome them herself. Very few viewers could have guessed what a literary talent the woman acting in these roles would prove to be. Emine Sevgi Ozdamar is familiar with the feeling of being underestimated. She is even empowered by it.

Even the title of her debut roman bucked literary conventions. It's a mini-story of its own — her need to tell stories apparently can't be stopped. The method convinced the demanding jury of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Ozdamar won the award in Ozdamar grinned wryly about these honours. After all, she was rather insulted that some critics trivialised her books as "migrant literature" and did not take them seriously.

Yet Ozdamar brought a huge force into German-speaking literature. A force that brings the joy of storytelling to the fore and doesn't concern itself with narrative conventions.