Fatma Aydemir
Fatma Aydemir (born 1986 in Karlsruhe) is a German-Turkish journalist and writer. She lives in Berlin. Her grandparents came as guest workers to Germany when their parents were teenagers. She studied German and American Studies in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2012 Aydemir has lived in Berlin and worked as an editor for the daily newspaper taz, where she deals with pop culture, literature and Turkey. She initiated the bilingual web portal taz.gazete in response to the state repression of press freedom in Turkey. As a freelance writer, she also writes for Spex and Missy Magazine. In 2017 her debut novel Ellbogen (verbally: elbow) was published. It tells a story of escalating violence in a subway station.
Literary criticism was split in their opinion:
Critique Philipp Bovermann from the Süddeutsche Zeitung appreciates Aydemir's clear language and feels the book serves two kicks in the stomach: "One for the misogyne Turkish society. And one for the mendacity of the oh so liberal Germans. "
Andrea Diener from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, on the other hand, would have wished for more nuanced observations of the German-Turkish protagonist Hazal: "The author does not attach much importance to us becoming sympathetic to this Hazal in the course of the book, and so she slips away from the reader".
In 2017 Aydemir received the € 10,000 Klaus-Michael-Kühne-Prize of the Harbor-Front-Literature Festival for the best debut novel of the year. She was also the German prizewinner the Franz-Hessel-Prize 2017.