Bejan Matur

is an award-winning poet of land, myth and memory — an elemental voice rising from the red-soiled highlands where Anatolia meets Mesopotamia. Born in Maraş to a Kurdish Alevi family, Bejan Matur writes primarily in Turkish yet keeps the pulse of the forbidden Kurdish tongue of her childhood and the cadence of Alevi ritual humming beneath every line. Since her trail-blazing debut, Winds Howl Through the Mansions (1996), Matur has published nine books of poetry and several works of prose. Her verses braid shamanic myth, Sufi mysticism and fierce political witness: they let stones speak, turn wind into scripture and carry the stories of displaced peoples and forgotten gods. Critics have called her “a poetic oracle”—at once fiercely grounded and luminously lyrical. Translated into 46 languages — including full English collections In the Temple of a Patient God and How Abraham Abandoned Me — Matur’s work travels widely while remaining rooted in ancestral soil. Beyond the page she has served as a newspaper columnist, directed the Diyarbakır Cultural Art Foundation and continues to advise on Kurdish issues. Today she moves between Berlin, London and Istanbul, walking the ancient fault-lines that keep her poetry earthy, feminine and timeless—bridging oral tradition with written word, ritual with reality, and offering quiet rebellion for the modern soul.