Menekşe Toprak

Menekşe Toprak (born 1970 in Kayseri, Turkey) is a German–Turkish writer, literary translator, and cultural journalist. She lives in Berlin and Istanbul.

Early life and education
Toprak initially lived with her grandfather in a village in the Kayseri Province and moved to Germany at the age of nine to join her parents, who were part of the first generation of recruited Turkish workers. Toprak attended school in Cologne. At the age of 15, she returned to Turkey and completed her high school education at the Yahya Kemal Beyatlı Gymnasium in Ankara. She then studied political science at Ankara University.

Career
After completing her studies, she worked for four years at a bank in Ankara, two of which were spent in a Berlin branch of the bank. She briefly worked as a project manager at the Bertelsmann Book Club in Warsaw.

Starting from 2002, she worked as a radio journalist for the public radio station Radio Multikulti in Berlin, contributing to the Turkish-language programs in the field of German literary criticism.

Toprak writes short stories and novels in Turkish. She began her writing career with short stories, with her first short story Eve Dönüş (Homecoming) being published in the magazine Kitap-lık in 2005. Her story collection Valizdeki Mektup (The Letter in the Suitcase) was published in 2007, followed by Hangi Dildedir Aşk (Which Language Is Love) in 2009. Her debut novel Temmuz Çocukları (July Children) was published in 2011. Her novel Ağıtın Sonu (The End of the Lament) was awarded the Duygu Asena Novel Prize in 2015. Her novel Arı Fısıltıları (Whispers of Bees) won the Ankara University Literature Prize in the Novel category in 2019. Her novel Déjà-vu was published in 2022, for which she received the "Work Grant of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe for Literature in Non-German Language" in 2021.

Toprak's works have been translated into several languages, including German, French, English, Italian, and Serbian.

The story Die Begegnung by Toprak, translated into German by Ruth Haerkötter, is from her collection Valizdeki Mektup and is included in the anthology ''Türkische Erzählungen des 20. Jahrhunderts'', published in 2008 by Insel-Verlag. In the cultural and societal magazine Freitext, the story "Der Brief im Koffer" (Turkish: "Valizdeki Mektup"), translated into German by Koray Yilmaz Günay, was published in 2012.

She also worked as a literary translator from 1999 to 2003, translating works by Arseni Tarkovski, Zafer Şenocak, and Akif Pirinçci into Turkish.

Short stories

 * Valizdeki Mektup (The Letter in the Suitcase), Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat, Istanbul, 2007. ISBN 978-975-08-1207-1
 * Hangi Dildedir Aşk (Which Language Is Love), Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat, Istanbul, 2009. ISBN 978-975-08-1597-3

Novels

 * Temmuz Çocukları (July Children), Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat, Istanbul, 2011. ISBN 978-975-08-1940-7
 * Ağıtın Sonu (The End of the Lament), İletişim, Istanbul, 2014. ISBN 978-975-05-1412-8
 * Arı Fısıltıları (Whispers of Bees), İletişim Yayınları, Istanbul, 2018. ISBN 978-975-05-2437-0
 * Déjà-vu, Doğan Kitap, Istanbul, 2022. ISBN 978-625-8215-13-7

Published in German

 * Die Geschichte von der Frau, den Männern und den verlorenen Märchen (The Story of the Woman, the Men, and the Lost Fairy Tales), translated by Sabine Adatepe, Orlanda, Berlin, 2017. ISBN 978-3-944666-34-1