Foto: privat

Ahmet Kahraman was born in Bingöl, Turkey, in 1941. His book Bir Dönemin door Büyükleri (Great Turks of Our Times) brought on legal charges against him by those same “Great Turks”—two former emergency-governors, a former intelligence chief, a former army chief and a once-militant fascist, who is said to be responsible for numerous political killings in Turkey and whose voice Kahraman recognized on the telephone as death threats were uttered against him. He barely escaped an assassination attempt. In 1998, he moved to Germany and expected to stay here only briefly. But the Turkish-Kurdish journalist and author’s short stay became an exile with no end in sight. In September 1999, he received a grant from the German PEN Writers in Exile Program. Today, he continues the dialogue with his readers in Turkey and Europe via the Internet. Ahmet Kahraman, who always considered writing a political and social endeavor, has released seventeen books in Turkey so far, but many of his manuscripts remain unpublished. At the end of August 2002, he left the Writers in Exile Program. Ahmet Kahraman still lives in Germany.