Cigdem Akyol | |
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![]() Akyol in 2018 | |
Born | October 1978 46) Herne, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany | (age
Occupation | Journalist |
Alma mater | University of Cologne |
Notable works | Ich wollte nie in die Türkei |
Cigdem Akyol (born October 1978) is a German journalist and author of Turkish-Kurdish ancestry. [1]
Akyols parents moved from Turkey to Germany in 1973 and settled in the Ruhr region in Herne. Akyol grew up in Herne, where she attended the Haranni-Gymnasium (high school). After her graduation in 1998 she studied international law and Eastern European history at the University of Cologne. Then she moved to Berlin to attend a journalism school and began working as a journalist. From 2006 to 2014, she worked for Berlin-based national German newspaper Die Tageszeitung , for which she often reported from abroad. In 2014, she accepted a temporary position the Deutsche Presse-Agentur offered in Istanbul. After the completion of her term she remained in Istanbul working as a freelance journalist and book author.
In 2015, she published a book about Turkey in the 21st century, describing it as a conflicted split society and in 2016 she followed it up with an extensive biography of the Turkish politician and president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. [1] [2]
Since 2019, Akyol has been a staff writer at the Swiss weekly WOZ. [3]
In 2024, Akyol published her first novel about a family of Turkish immigrants in Germany.