Guest of the ilb 2007
Aslı Erdoğan
was born in Istanbul in 1967. With her origins in the secular middle
class, she attended the English-medium school Robert Lisesi and studied
computer science at the Bosphorus University, Istanbul. She then worked
at the Faculty for Physics at her university and for the European
Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN in Geneva, where she completed
her master’s degree at the same time wrote her first novel. »Kabuk
Adam« (t: The Shell Man) appeared in 1994, while Erdoğan prepared her
doctoral thesis. She never finished her studies but she did finish her
short story »Mucizevi Mandarin« (1996; t: The wonderful Mandarin),
which was published after her return to Turkey following travels in
South America and Africa. Since then Erdoğan has made her living as a
writer.
Using stylistic tools belonging
to postmodernism and traditions from world literature, she explores
both her Turkish heritage and a sense of the foreign through an
undogmatic gaze. Against the background of a globalized world the
fields of freedom and solitude are plumbed and the porous relationship
of reality and illusion is portrayed. As a means of orientation
Erdoğan, the human rights activist, focuses on tracing suffering and
injustice. »Mucizevi Mandarin« tells the story of a young woman who
becomes blind in one eye after her lover deserts her, and plunges into
melancholy and a dream world of nightly walks and visits to
coffeehouses, by Lake Geneva. The short story »Tahta kuşlar« (t: Wooden
birds), which in 1996 won the prize of the radio station Deutsche
Welle, depicts a multinational group comprised of very different young
women and their moving collective longing to participate in life.
Erdoğan’s novel »Kırmızı Pelerinli Kent« (2003; Eng. »The City in
Crimson Cloak«, 2007) has been translated into twelve languages and
will come out in Germany in 2008. The novel depicts Rio de Janeiro –
from the perspective of a young Turkish woman on the verge of losing
sense of self – as a metropolis that is as vital as it is brutal and
merciless. The author’s most recent novel, »Hayatın Sessizliğinde«
(2005; t: In the calm of life), was adapted as a dance piece and named
Book of the Year by the Dünya Publishing House.
Erdoğan is a member of PEN and
the Turkish Writer’s Union as well as a founding member of the Art and
Literature Forum of Diyarbakır, where she regularly gives workshops,
seminars and readings. She writes for various newspapers and, from 1998
to 2000, wrote a column for the Turkish paper »Radikal«. A selection of
her articles and commentaries, most of which address human rights
issues, has been published in two volumes to date. Following the
assassination of a friend, the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Erdoğan
has, not for the first time, attracted the wrath of Nationalists for
her opinions expressed in public. The author lives in Istanbul.
© international literature festival berlin
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