Aysel Özakın

Aysel Özakın (* 1942 in Urfa ) is a Turkish writer . The author, who now publishes in English, has also written in Turkish and German in various phases of her career .

A good example of her sensitive, carefully observing prose is a novel published in Turkish in 1975 under the title Gurbet Yavrum and in 1987 in German under the title The Flying Carpet: On the Trail of My Father , in which the first-person narrator, a young Turkish woman, flies to Canada to teach her father, who has emigrated there, the death of her mother. Like all of her works published in German, the book is currently only available as an antiquarian.

Özakın studied French at the Gazi Teacher Training Institute in Ankara and Paris , then worked as a French teacher in Ankara and Paris.

Her work as a writer has been honored several times by renowned literary juries.

Özakın left Turkey three months after the 1980 military coup . She accepted an invitation from the Berlin Literary Colloquium to come to Germany.

In her work, she did not see herself as belonging to guest workers or migration literature, but felt herself to be part of an international intellectual class. She left Germany in 1990, partly because she felt this approach was not understood in Germany, and repeatedly felt pushed into the stereotypes of the oriental, oppressed woman without knowledge of German.

Özakın moved to Cornwall, England, where she now lives and publishes in English. However, books have not been published since they moved. Until his death she lived with the English painter and sculptor Bryan Ingham (1936–1997), whose name she uses today - alternatively with the first names Aysel and Anna.

literature

• Mediha Göbenli: Contemporary Turkish Women’s Literature. A comparative literature analysis of selected works by Leylâ Erbil, Füruzan, Pınar Kür and Aysel Özakın. Schwarz, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-87997-307-5 ( digitized version ).
• Annette Wierschke: Because you dance on a rope - positions of German-language migrant literature . Stauffenberg Verlag, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-86057-030-7 , p. 179.

Web links

• Literature by and about Aysel Özakın in the catalog of the German National Library