Turkish Poem Moon – Gonca Özmen

Jan 15, 2021 | Voices | 0 comments

Turkish, also referred to as Istanbul Turkish(İstanbul Türkçesi) or Turkey Turkish (Türkiye Türkçesi), is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 70 to 80 million speakers, the national language of Turkey. Outside its native country, significant smaller groups of speakers exist in Iraq, Syria, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Northern Cyprus, Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia. Cyprus has requested that the European Union add Turkish as an official language, even though Turkey is not a member state.

Gonca Özmen is a Turkish poet and translator who has performed in this audio which is a collage of her essay about Water and the poem Moon.

About Author

Gonca Özmen

Gonca Özmen was born in Burdur, Southern Turkey, 1982. She studied English Language/Literature at the University of Istanbul, and was awarded a Ph. D in 2016 for a thesis on Ekphrastic Poetry. She has published three books of poetry, many essays and critical articles to date. A selection of her poetry entitled “The Sea Within” was published in George Messo’s translation by Shearsman in 2011. Elif Verlag published her second book “Belki Sessiz” in Monika Carbe’s German in 2017. She has won many awards for her poetry, last December her 2019 collection “Bile İsteye” was awarded the Yunus Nadi Award for Poetry, one of the most prestigious Turkish literary prizes. Özmen has translated many poems and children’s books and is currently translating Sylvia Plath’s “Collected Poems”.