Literary Salon – The Bridge of The Golden Horn

Written by Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Performed by Tan Kheng Hua in English, with post-show dialogue by Shermin Langhoff

This literary salon will feature a reading of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s autobiographical coming-of-age novel The Bridge of the Golden Horn by acclaimed Singaporean actress Tan Kheng Hua, with a post-show dialogue by Shermin Langhoff. A Turkish teenager, the unnamed heroine, signs up as a Gastarbeiter (guest worker) in Germany. Lying about her age, she leaves Istanbul and works on an assembly line in Berlin and lives in a factory hostel. The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a witty account of a precocious teenager refusing to become wise; of hectic years lived between Berlin and Istanbul; and of a young woman’s sentimental, sexual, political, and theatrical education.