Grenzgänge Theatre texts and prose by and with Ermine Sevgi Özdamar and Birol Ünel

Ermine Sevgi Özdamar is a poet and actress of Turkish extraction. Amongst other engagements, she was a member of the Bochum Ensemble under Claus Peyman as artistic director. She wrote her first stage play 25 years ago in German: Karagöz in Alamania, the premiere of which she staged herself in Frankfurt in 1986. It is the very first stage work by a German-Turkish writer that was produced on an important German stage.

Commenting on her first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai, which she wrote aged 44, no less a person that Juan Goytisolo said: »No Turkish author, apart from this writer, has written anything comparable – by which I mean a novel that gallops right through the two cultures.« And the great John Berger wrote about her: »… a poet of disappearances, of the unsayable: funny and terrible at the same time.«