Ayşe Şasa

Ayşe Şasa — Biography

Ayşe Şasa (1 January 1941, Istanbul – 16 June 2014, Istanbul) was a Turkish screenwriter and author. She graduated from the Arnavutköy American College for Girls (now Robert College) in 1960, studied administrative sciences at the same institution, and began writing screenplays in 1963.

One of the most prolific writers of the Yeşilçam era, she penned films such as Ah Güzel İstanbul (1966), Battal Gazi Destanı (1971), Utanç (1972) and Gramofon Avrat (1987). Married three times, her second husband was the director Atıf Yılmaz. In 1993 she published her writings on cinema under the title Yeşilçam Günlüğü.

After a personal crisis around 1980 she withdrew from cinema for about a decade; she returned with a Sufi outlook and became known for her reflections on Ibn Arabi and Andrei Tarkovsky. She died of pneumonia in 2014.