Emine Sevgi Özdamar: Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum

The writer in conversation with Sandra Paoli
Moderation Gregor H. Lersch

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, an outstanding author who has opened up new horizons, themes and a highly poetic sound for the German language and literature, is coming to the Casa di Goethe. Özdamar, who once came to divided Berlin from Turkey, has been enriching the German-language literary scene for over three decades with her novels, stories and plays, including her opus magnum Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum (Suhrkamp Verlag 2021), from which she will read on this evening.
Unusual literary stylistic devices and Turkish-inspired ways of speaking characterise her multi-perspective texts, which unfold a broad panorama of German-Turkish history alongside intimate personal experiences – from the First World War to the spirit of optimism of the 1960s and 1970s to the present day. Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work opens up an intellectual and poetic dialogue between different languages, cultures and world views.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar grew up in Istanbul, where she attended drama school. In the mid-seventies, she moved to Berlin and Paris and worked with directors Benno Besson, Matthias Langhoff and Claus Peymann. She has taken on numerous film roles and has been writing theatre plays, novels and short stories since 1982. Emine Sevgi Özdamar lives in Germany, Turkey and France. In 1991 she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with excerpts from her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei – hat zwei Türen – aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich heraus, which was published in 1992. Her second novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn followed in 1998. In 2022, she was awarded the Düsseldorf Literature Prize, the Schiller Prize and the Georg Büchner Prize for Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum.

The cultural and literary scholar Sandra Paoli conducts research into the comparative study of literature and film in the diaspora. Her publications on these topics include L’Occidente transculturale al femminile (Mimesis, 2018).
She has collaborated with various newspapers and is responsible for the section A Certain Look at ytali and has edited the anthology Caleidoscopio tedesco. She is a lecturer at the University of Udine and the University of Roma Tre.

The event will be held in German with simultaneous translation into Italian.