The writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize 2022 in Darmstadt on Saturday. Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) said in Berlin that as a “linguistic, masterful storyteller”, Özdamar enriched German literature with her highly poetic sound with new, different and surprising perspectives. The author is an important mediator between cultures. Özdamar is an outstanding author, “to whom the German language and literature owes new horizons, themes and a highly poetic sound,” the German Academy for Language and Poetry justified its decision.
Ozdamar was born on August 10, 1946 in Malatya, Turkey and grew up in Istanbul and Bursa. In 1965 she came to West Berlin for the first time. From 1967 to 1970 she took acting lessons in Istanbul. Her first roles were in plays by Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss. After the military coup in Turkey in 1971, Özdamar went to the East Berlin Volksbühne in 1975. She later worked in Avignon and Paris and from 1979 to 1984 at the Bochumer Schauspielhaus under the directorship of Claus Peymann. A text from her 1992 debut novel “Life is a caravanserai – has two doors – I came in from one – I went out from the other” brought her literary breakthrough in 1991 with the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. The award-winning writer, actress and theater director lives in Germany, Turkey and France.
In her acceptance speech, Özdamar said, according to the speech manuscript, that everyone has a personal sky in which not only the stars shine constantly, but also the people who have touched them deeply. For her, one of these people is “my brother Georg Büchner”. She found out about him when she returned to Istanbul from Berlin in 1968 and attended drama school there. A teacher recommended that she read the author, who died in exile at the age of 23.
The Büchner Prize, endowed with 50,000 euros, is the most important German literary prize. The award was first presented in 1923, last year to the Austrian writer and translator Clemens J. Setz.