Born in 1940, Oya Baydar graduated from Notre Dame de Sion High School for girls. The youth novel which she wrote in her senior year was published in the Hurriyet newspaper, introducing her as “the tFrançoise Sagan of Turkey”. Her first book, “Allah Çocukları Unuttu” (The God Forgot his Children), was published in 1961 and the second one titled “Savaş Çağı Umut Çağı” (The Age of War, the Age of Hope) was published in 1964.
She studied sociology in Istanbul University between 1960 and 1964, and after graduation she started working as an assistant lecturer in the same department. At the same time she began writing her doctorate thesis, titled “The Emergence of the Working Class in Turkey”. She quit writing literature in the 1960s, during which the socialist ideology and organizing began in Turkey, and focused on researching on the socio-political structures. She got actively involved in the socialist movement.
She was arrested and dismissed from her work at the university for being a member of the Turkish Teachers’ Trade Union and the Turkish Labour Party. After her release she worked as a columnist in the Yeni Ortam (New Environment) and the Politika (Politics) newspapers until 1980. She had to flee Turkey after the coup d’etat on September 12, 1980, and lived in exile in Frankfurt, Germany until 1992. During her years of exile, she lived in various European cities and Moscow. She witnessed the collapse of the socialist system and the Berlin wall, for which she commented, “This wall fell on of us all”.
In the early ‘90s, she began writing short stories to overcome the phycological depression she was going through due to the collapse of the socialist practice. She frequently expressed her mood with a quote from the famous story writer, Sait Faik: “If I hadn’t written, I”d go insane”.
Her book, Elveda Alyoşa (Farewell Alyosha), which compiled her stories of exile and the collapse of the socialist system, is published in 1991 in Turkey and was awarded with the Sait Faik Story Prize. She won the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize in 1993 with her Kedi Mektupları (Letters of the Cat) novel. Her next novel Hiçbiryer’e Dönüş (Return to Nowhereland) was published in 1998. Sıcak Külleri Kaldı, published in 2000, won the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize. She received her next award, the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize, with her Erguvan Kapısı, which was publihed in 2004. Her latest novel, Kayıp Söz, was published in 2008 and the same year it was translated to German.
Oya Baydar currently lives in Turkey; spending her time both in Istanbul and the Marmara Island.
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