Doğan Akhanlı, born in Şavşat in 1957, lived in Cologne from 1992. From 1985-1987, he was a political prisoner in a military prison in Istanbul. In 1991, he fled to Germany and applied for political asylum. He has written numerous novels and a play and has repeatedly campaigned for the recognition and reappraisal of historical violence and for the indivisibility of human rights. His novel Madonna'nın Son Hayali (Madonna's Last Dream, 2005) tells the story of the »Struma« case, in which a ship carrying over 700 Jewish refugees was sunk in the Black Sea in 1942. In his novel The Judges of the Last Judgement (2007), he addressed the genocide of the Armenians in 1915. His first play in German, Anne's Silence, premiered at Theater unterm Dach Berlin in 2012. In 2017, he was arrested in Spain on a Turkish arrest warrant and wrote the book Arrest in Granada, which was staged at Schauspiel Köln in 2020. In 2013 he received the Pfarrer-Georg-Fritze-Preis in Cologne, in 2018 the European Tolerance Prize in Austria and in 2019 he was awarded the Goethe Medal. He died on October 31, 2021 in Berlin.
