BORN IN 1961 IN ANKARA, Zafer Şenocak immigrated to Germany with his parents in 1970. The family settled in Munich, where Mr. Şenocak continued his education and completed the Abitur in 1981. He studied German literature, politics, and philosophy at the Ludwig- Maximilian University in Munich until 1987. During the 1980s, at the dawn of German migrant literature, Şenocak began to publish his lyric poetry, winning the Literary Prize of the City of Munich in 1984 and the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize in 1988. The same year, together with Eva Hund, he translated a novel by Aras Ören into German, titled Eine verspätete Abrechnung. Translations of works by Aras Ören, an established author living in Germany but writing in Turkish, had appeared since the 1970s; they played an important role in making the migrant experience more accessible to German-speaking audiences. Şenocak also translated older Turkish poetry into German, including the works of Yunus Emre, a fourteenth-century mystic, and of Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth-century folk poet. Zafer Şenocak moved to Berlin in 1990, where he has worked as a freelance writer ever since. In the course of the 1990s, Zafer Şenocak has emerged as one of the most influential and incisive commentators on Turkish-German cultural interrelations.

While he initially became known for his poetry, Mr. Şenocak has since become more prominent as an essayist and social critic, focusing on the societal and cultural challenges Germany faces following its reunification. Şenocak's essays target the stereotypes and assumptions made of Turkish Germans, especially in light of negative views of Arabs and Islam in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Atlas des tropischen Deutschlands (1993) addresses the question of the assimilation of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and War Hitler Araber? (1994) is a collection of essays challenging the notion of Islam as an anti-Western conspiracy. These essays appeared in the wake of deadly attacks against Turkish immigrants in Mölln and Solingen and thus represented a brave confrontation with the tumultuous times in which they were published.

In the mid-nineties, Şenocak turned to fiction as the vehicle of his criticism. His tetralogy begins with Der Mann im Unterhemd, a collection of short stories, published in 1995. Gefährliche Verwandtschaft appeared in 1998 and continues the tale of Sascha Muhteschem, begun a year earlier in Die Prärie (1997).