Aras Ören

Aras Ören — Biography

Aras Ören, born in Istanbul on 1 November 1939, is a Turkish writer, poet and journalist who settled in Germany, and he has also acted.

He moved to Berlin in 1969. He worked as an editor at Sender Freies Berlin and led the Turkish-language desk of Radio Multikulti at Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. An honorary prize from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts came in 1981 and the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1985; he lectured at the University of Tübingen in 1999 and has belonged to the Academy of Arts in Berlin since 2012.

He composes in Turkish and takes part in carrying his texts over into German, and a number of his books came out in German first. Among them are Niyazi Naunynstrasse'de ne istiyor (1973), Privatexil (1976), Almanya, bir Türk masalı (1978), Lütfen, polis yok (1981), Berlin-Savignyplatz (1995) and Hollywood özlemi (1999). Two later volumes, the short-story collection Kopfstand (2014) and Wir neuen Europäer (2016), which gathers pieces written since the 1960s, were illustrated by the painter Wolfgang Neumann. On screen he appeared in a 1975 Tatort episode and in the film High Society Limited (1982).