Buket Uzuner was born October 3, 1955 in Ankara, Turkey. She is an author of novels, short stories and travelogues. She studied biology and environmental science and has conducted research and presented lectures at universities in Turkey, Norway, the United States, and Finland. Buket Uzuner travels as "solo woman backpacker" since 1980s including "inter-rail" tours in Europe and in three other continents while writing her travel memoirs. Her first travelogue The Travel Notes of A Brunette was published in 1988 and sold more than 300.000 copies. Uzuner wrote two more travel books as Travel Notes of An Urban Romantic which questions the meaning of exoticism and New York Logbook which are all collected lately in Travel Library of Buket Uzuner.
In 2013 her novel Istanbullular is published in USA by Dalkey Archive Press with the title of I Am Istanbul. Uzuner's books have been on the Turkish best-seller lists since 1992. They are taught in a number of Turkish universities. In 1993, Buket Uzuner was awarded Turkey's Yunus Nadi prize for the novel The Sound of Fishsteps, and in 1998 Mediterranean Waltz was named novel of the year by the University of Istanbul.
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