Background
Esmahan Aykol was born in Edirne in 1970, in an emigrant family of mixed origins. Her father is from Macedonia while her grandmother was Bulgarian.
Esmahan Aykol was born in Edirne in 1970, in an emigrant family of mixed origins. Her father is from Macedonia while her grandmother was Bulgarian.
She attended a British boarding school in Istanbul, where German was taught as a second language.
Aykol received a degree in law from Istanbul University and a postgraduate degree in law from Humboldt University of Berlin, where her dissertation was on discrimination and differences between Turkish and German divorce law. During her studies in Istanbul, she wrote articles on social issues for Turkish cultural journals, including coverage of the city"s street children. Following her degree in 1996, she opened a public with a friend, but it was unsuccessful.
Aykol"s first novel, Kitapçı Dükkani was published in 2001.
lieutenant featured Kati Hirschel, the owner of Istanbul"s only crime fiction bookstore, a woman of German origin, whose inquisitiveness and passion for crime novels leads her to investigate a murder. The book was a bestseller and was followed by sequels, including Kelepir Ev (2003), Şüpheli Bir Ölüm (2007), and Tango Istanbul (2012).
As of 2015, three of these books have been translated into English. In 2006, Aykol published Savrulanlar, about a woman named Ece who escapes to London after a failed love affair.
The book is an ode to the ancient art of storytelling, which remains a tradition of great honour among the Kurdish and Armenian communities in Turkey.
Foreign authenticity in her novel, Aykol trained at a goldsmith"s shop in Kreuzberg, Berlin, as well as with an Armenian silversmith in Istanbul. Aykol lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul. She has taken up German citizenship.