About Fatma Sagir

Author.

She lives in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

Reinhold Schneider Award for Literature (Scholarship) 2025

Fatma Sagir writes in the spaces between languages, memories, and belonging. Her work moves between lyrical prose and poetry, blending autobiographical depth with social and political reflection. With subtle precision and poetic clarity, she explores themes such as migration, female empowerment, marginalised perspectives, and the question of what it means to be seen – or rendered invisible – today.

Born in Anatolia/Turkey and raised in Hanover/Germany, she weaves personal history with scholarly insight, poetry with politics, tenderness with sharp observation. Her texts speak of resilience and remembrance, of fractured identities and shifting languages, of home and estrangement – always rooted in the contemporary moment.

Her book Alphabet of Longing. Texts on Forgetting (Edition SchreibStimme, Uster/2021) offers a multi-voiced, poetic portrait of migrant experience in Germany. For her literary work, she was awarded in 2025 the Reinhold Schneider Prize by the City of Freiburg.

 

Texts and Works

  • Columns

    Fatma contributes to the ‘Columns for Context’ weekly supplement of Taz, cooperatively-owned, socially progressive German daily newspaper.

  • Personally Selected Clippings

    Read through a personally curated collection of Fatma’s articles here.

  • Editorally Selected Clippings

    Read one of Fatma’s highlighted pieces on the German-language Heinrich Böll Stiftung website, here.

  • Academic Papers

    Explore Fatma’s academic contributions on the University of Freiburg website, here.

Projects and Cooperations

 

Heinrich Böll Stiftung Baden Württemberg

Art project to promote a digital culture of remembrance literature.

More information here.

Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg

Exhibition ‘50 years of recruitment agreement. Welcome to Almanya.’

Conception and management of an artistic and scientific supporting program for a photo exhibition by Candida Höfer.

Herder Publishing House

Editor, translator, and author of specialized theological texts.

For the traditional Freiburg publisher Herder, Fatma Sagir curated texts by the writer Ilija Trojanow and published them in an anthology.

Fatma curated Illija Trojanow’s texts for the ‘Sehnsucht’ anthology, published by the traditional Freiburg publisher Herder.

Fatma Sagir (ed.). Ilija Teoyanov. ‘Sehnsucht. Mach dich auf den Weg.’ Herder, 2008.

Turkish Library at the Unionsverlag Zurich in Cooperation with the Robert Bosch Stiftung and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Translator and Editor

Information about the Turkish library at the Unionsverlag Zurich can be found by clicking on the image or by following this link.

Information about the Robert Bosch Stiftung can be found here.