Tezer Özlü: Die kalten Nächte der Kindheit

16.01.2026 / 19:00 – 21:00

Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Deniz Utlu in conversation with Martina Wunderer

“1949. In a provincial town in Anatolia with 4,000 inhabitants I learn to see the world. I am six years old. […] I sense the immeasurable vastness of the world and know that I will leave and go far away.” This is how Tezer Özlü writes to the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 1981, shortly before she leaves for Berlin on a year-long fellowship. Just a year earlier, in her novel Cold Nights of Childhood – now newly translated into German by Deniz Utlu – she had already succeeded in lifting these images of growing up out of their dark, yearning depths, with shimmering, hovering sentences that are firm and fragile, heavy and light at the same time.

As an adult, the narrator finds the freedom she once dreamed of in observing and strolling through Berlin, Paris, and Zurich, in language and in writing. She fights with resilience against the bitterness of the world and its shrill-whistling and psychiatric categorizations, in order to create through literature a space of her own for finer perception – a space in which life is possible.

Long read and revered in Turkey, “Tezer Özlü’s world literature” – as Berlin Review No. 15 sums up with great admiration – is now finally being recognized in Germany as well. On this evening, editor Martina Wunderer will speak with writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar and the author and translator of the novel, Deniz Utlu, about their readings of this great literary rediscovery.

A joint event by Literaturhaus Berlin, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and Suhrkamp Verlag.

Reading and discussion in German
Admission free

daadgalerie
Oranienstraße 161
Berlin-Kreuzberg

Photo: Renate von Mangoldt