WINNER OF THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE 2004 for most successful debut novel for Selam Berlin (2003), which also earned her the 2004 Adelbert-von-Chamisso Förderpreis (promotional prize), Yadé Kara is a commercially successful Turkish-German writer. Kara, a “staunch West Berliner,” who had a diverse career as a journalist, actress, teacher and manager in four metropolises before becoming a writer, was born in Çayırlı, eastern Anatolia, in 1965 and moved to Germany with her parents as a child. In her thoughtful and at times critical Chamisso Prize acceptance speech, she compares her coming to Germany and her identity as a Berliner to Adelbert von Chamisso’s circumstances, writing:

Kara belongs to the “second generation” of Turkish-German women writers, and her work has enjoyed popular success while developing a distinctive style that sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, not least in the work’s narration through a male protagonist. I will argue that despite these differences, however, her work, and in particular her second novel, Cafe Cyprus (2008), forms part of a new trend of (female) Turkish-German writers whose texts are reterritorialized on ideological concepts such as religion, family, and nation. While the majority of these authors focus on peppy, entertaining, yet ultimately orientalizing narratives of “harmless” Turkish-German family lives, for Yadé Kara reterritorialization takes the form of a very concrete notion of identity politics, mouthed by characters in her work, and jarring in the mouth of the supposedly apolitical narrator Hasan, who in Selam Berlin seemed more inclined toward description than programmatic statement. This reterritorialization is even more developed in Cafe Cyprus, set in London in the early 1990s, than in Selam Berlin, set in Berlin between the fall of the Wall and reunification; Cafe Cyprus thus presents an interesting response to citizenship debates in early twenty-first-century Germany.