Tomris Uyar


Tomris Uyar was a Turkish writer, translator and journalist.

Life and career

Rana Tomris Gedik was born in Istanbul, the daughter of two lawyers and granddaughter of Republican People's Party politician Süleyman Sırrı Gedik. She graduated in journalism in 1963 and lived in Istanbul, working as a freelance writer and translator. From the mid-1960s she published stories, diaries, translations and literary criticism.
Uyar was a prolific writer of short stories, of which eleven volumes were published. She translated into Turkish works in English, French and German by authors including Virginia Woolf, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Gabriel García Márquez. Uyar was amongst a group of poets that brought existentialism and surrealism to Turkish literature. She was an active opponent of the Vietnam War.
In 1975 she and her husband Turgut Uyar won a Turkish Language Society prize for their translation of Lucretius' natural encyclopedia De rerum natura. In 1980 and 1987 she was one of two Turkish authors who were awarded the Sait Faik Short Story Award. In 1987 she received the Theater Art Development Foundation's annual award in memory of actor Avni Dilligil, and in 2002 the Dünya award for the best narrative volume of the year. In the same year she was awarded the Sedat Simavi Literature Award.
Tomris Uyar died of esophagus cancer in 2003.

Tribute

In 2020, Google celebrated her with a Google Doodle.

Selected works

; Short stories and other writings
; Diaries