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, among others. She appeared in several films and has been writing plays, novels, and short stories since 1982. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1991 and the Kleist Prize in 2004. She lives in Berlin.
Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum can be considered her ‘life’s novel’. For this work she received the Bavarian Book Prize 2021, the Georg Büchner Prize 2022, the Düsseldorf Literature Prize 2022 and the Schiller Prize 2022. In addition, the book was on the shortlist for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2022. (2022)