The most coveted award for German-language literature goes to the Anatolian author – who only learned German as an adult.
With Slovenian-born Ana Marwan, a non-native speaker won this year’s Bachmann Prize – something Emine Sevgi Özdamar did 21 years before her. In 1991, no one would have dreamed that Özdamar would one day receive the most prestigious award for German-language literature, the Georg Büchner Prize, in the language she only learned as an adult. It follows Austrian author Clemens Setz.
Özdamar, who celebrates his 76th birthday today, grew up in Turkey. As an adult, she first came to Germany without any knowledge of German. In the years that followed, however, she continued to study and act in theater in her homeland. It wasn’t until the military coup in 1971 that she didn’t see a future in Turkey. She went to East Berlin as an assistant director at the Volksbühne. There she worked with Benno Besson, later, among other things – as an actress and assistant director – at the Bochum theater under Claus Peymann.
However, her autobiographical novel about a girl’s childhood in Turkey, “Life is a caravanserai, it has two doors, I went in the other, I came out” made her much better known to the public; she also won the Bachmann Prize for an excerpt from it. It was not her first work and several followed: the novels “A Ponte do Horn de Ouro” and “Estranhas Estrelas Olham a Terra”, but also plays and short stories.
The big comeback since 2021
But in the decades it was quiet about the author. Even more surprising than in 2021, when a new novel was published, again autobiographical, again highly praised by critics: “A Space Bounded by Shadows” tells of Özdamar’s emigration from Turkey to Germany, of his experiences in Berlin, Paris and Istanbul. The novel was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
Much more important than that, of course, is the Georg Büchner Prize, endowed with 50,000 euros. Considered the most important literary prize in the German-speaking world, it has been awarded by the German Academy of Language and Poetry in Darmstadt since 1951, and only eleven female authors before Özdamar have received it. “Unusual literary stylistic devices and Turkish-inspired ways of speaking characterize his multi-perspective texts, which, in addition to intimate personal experiences, unfold a wide panorama of German-Turkish history (…), from the First World War to the spirit of optimism of the sixty and seventy to this day.” , says in the jury statement.
Özdamar’s work opens up “an intellectual and poetic dialogue between different languages, cultures and worldviews, in which we can participate in reading”. Mora, Lukas Bärfuss and Elke Erb.
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