Life is a Caravanserai: Has Two Doors I Came in One I Went Out the Other

By the winner of the Georg-Büchner-Prize 2022

Emine Sevgi Özdamar's story of a girl growing up in the politically turbulent society of Turkey in the 1950s and 60s is told in a  raucous, unruly language that matches her world of powerful, raunchy women.  Özdamar fuses the poetic and the crude, the ironic and the tender in a rhapsodic journey from foetus to womanhood, via Turkish steppes, building-sites, baths and cities, to a new life in Germany. 


"A real social, moral and literary time-bomb. No Turkish writer - let alone a woman writer - has ever written anything of the kind before. An extraordinary imagination." Juan Goytisolo, The Times Literary Supplement

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Rights sold to

Turkey: Iletisim / Croatia: Leykam / Spain (Spanish): Alfaguara 

Prevously sold to but rights reverted: Finland: Gummerus / France: Editions Zoe / Great Britain: Middlesex University Press / Greece: Kastaniotis / Netherlands: De Geus/Breda / Norway: Aschehoug / Poland: Swiat Literacki / Spain (Catalan): Enciclopedia Catalana / Syria: Kanaan Press 

  • Publisher: KiWi-Taschenbuch
  • Release: 01.01.1992
  • ISBN: 978-3-462-02319-0
  • 384 Pages
  • Author: Emine Sevgi Özdamar
Life is a Caravanserai: Has Two Doors I Came in One I Went Out the Other
Emine Sevgi Özdamar Life is a Caravanserai: Has Two Doors I Came in One I Went Out the Other
Bild von Emine Sevgi Özdamar
Emine Sevgi Özdamar

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-Preis in 1991, the Kleist-Preis in 2004 and the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 2022. In 2017, she became a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Her work has been translated into many languages.  Emine Sevgi Özdamar lives in Berlin. 

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